African Entrepreneurship Records

Chapter 601 Prospects and Crisis of Rubber Plantation Industry

“The development path of the automobile industry is long, and we in East Africa are only at the stage of drawing on what has gone before. Perhaps the only major competitive parts that can be exported are tires!” Ernst lamented.

The so-called tires are rubber tires. Both Germany and Austria rely on imports of rubber, so the production and processing of rubber is one of the dominant core industries in East Africa. It is the same as sisal, but sisal also has other production areas in the world, but East Africa is best suited for growing sisal.

The rubber processing industry in East Africa has only just started a few years ago, but East Africa or the Hechingen Consortium is the patent owner of hollow pneumatic tires, and the biggest advantage of East Africa now is that most of the rubber production is monopolized by East Africa. This is Enns The result of special planning in advance.

 It will take time for South American countries to react. After all, expanding production and building new plantations requires a lot of energy and time.

 In fact, after East African rubber could be exported on a large scale, South American rubber-producing areas, especially Brazil, discovered East Africa's big move. Because East Africa had concealed it so well before, East Africa was caught off guard.

This is one of the effects of East Africa's isolation policy. Almost all rubber-producing areas in East Africa are inland. Even the nearest coastal plain producing areas are two to three hundred kilometers away from the Indian Ocean, and other countries cannot enter East Africa for domestic investigation. Therefore, before the first batch of rubber was exported from East Africa, no one knew that East Africa had surpassed Brazil to become the world's largest rubber growing country.

The Brazilian government did not respond much to this matter, because in the past few years after the rubber tree species were secretly introduced to East Africa, the British copied the behavior in East Africa, and now Southeast Asia is also experimenting with small-scale planting.

The behavior of the British was upright, and when the British experimented with planting in East Africa, the Great Lakes region, the first rubber-producing area in East Africa, was already ready for harvest, and several other rubber-producing areas in East Africa were also developed, including The largest rubber-producing area—the planting area of ​​Hesse Province (the tropical rainforest planting area at the western foot of the Mitumba Mountains).

Naturally, Brazil does not dare to blame Britain, but it is very depressed that East Africa has "suddenly" become the number one exporter of rubber. Brazil's supervision of rubber was not strict before. After all, the Brazilian government inherited from Portugal, with low administrative efficiency and serious corruption within the government. , under such national conditions, it is simply impossible for Brazil to block the export of rubber seeds.

  And it is no longer necessary now. Rubber has been planted in East Africa and Southeast Asia. East Africa has gone too far. It has quietly replaced Brazil as the world's largest rubber producer. Now the Brazilian government cannot even blockade it.

 The only thing that can be done is to expand the planting area and compete with East Africa. In the future, it will also compete with Southeast Asia. It can be said that it has a bad fate.

And even if the Brazilian government wants to make a difference now, it may only be able to survive for the next twenty years, because if nothing happens, the entire rubber planting industry in South America will be wiped out in the future.

Ernst knew that in the past life of South America, at the beginning of the 20th century, the entire rubber production industry would collapse due to rubber leaf blight, and its share of the world would fall from more than 90% to less than 1%.

Brazilian rubber planting industry is not so depressed now. Although East Africa has seized most of the market, it can still maintain about 15%.

 Because the rubber industry in the past was a monopoly in Brazil, there was not much motivation to expand production. After all, it could be sold at a price. At the same time, the rubber planting in East Africa was tightly guarded. If we were not careful, we were defeated by the rubber planting industry in East Africa.

This is also related to the population gap between the two countries. East Africa now has a population of more than 50 million (including blacks). In the past, there were a large number of blacks for East Africa. East Africa has consumed at least tens of millions of blacks in recent years. The eastern region alone There are tens of millions of black people.

The population of Brazil is only over 10 million, so there is a large amount of cheap labor available in East Africa. Brazil is not so lucky, but Brazil is better than the same period in previous generations.

Brazil's abolitionist movement in its previous life was in 1888. I don't know when Brazil will push forward this reform in this life. However, due to the expansion of East Africa's export of "labor" business, Brazil has become a beneficiary, and it is the largest recipient of black people from East Africa in the Americas. country.

Although the United States is rich, it still has to keep things secretive. Black “laborers” from East Africa still need to be transited through third-party countries such as Haiti, while East Africa can directly drag black “laborers” to Rio de Janeiro and send them away. Therefore, East Africa has actually imported a large amount of cheap labor to Brazil, especially after the immigration from East Africa itself decreased and the original immigrant ships were used to develop business in the Americas. As for Argentina, like East Africa, it is not interested in black people.

 In response to rubber leaf blight, what East Africa can do to prepare is to go to South America in advance to collect wild rubber tree species as a genetic reserve of rubber tree species.

In the past, rubber leaf blight was so severe that none of the Brazilian wild rubber species were spared, but Ernst believed that these wild rubber tree species would be of great use.

 So East Africa has basically completed this task within a few years after the first batch of rubber seeds were introduced, unless there are undiscovered tree species deep in the Amazon rainforest.

 The specific time period when rubber leaf blight broke out in South America in the previous life should be 1905. Of course, this was only the first time there was written record, so the rubber leaf blight should have appeared around 1900.

 But it could not have been earlier. For example, later, Southeast Asian rubber tree species also came from South America, but they survived.

  The destructiveness of rubber leaf blight to the rubber industry is similar to the destructiveness of banana wilt to Big Mac bananas. There is no good treatment method except geographical isolation.

 Hence, several rubber-producing areas in East Africa and many banana-producing areas in East Africa will be directly isolated from South America in the future.

 Big Mac bananas are extinct on a large scale, and there are Chinese bananas as alternatives. It is not so easy to find substitutes for rubber trees. The easiest way is to wait until the future for genetic improvement, or to use synthetic rubber.

As for genetic improvement, what East Africa can do is to retain more wild rubber tree varieties, so as not to allow other rubber tree varieties to follow the Brazilian rubber planting industry and be wiped out in the future.

And East Africa must also be prepared to prevent the tragedy of the Brazilian rubber planting industry from happening to East Africa. Regarding this, Ernst is prepared to manage the four major rubber producing areas in East Africa separately in the next twenty years, without direct contact with each other. intervention.

Just like in the previous life, the Thai government prohibited direct entry of aircraft from areas affected by rubber leaf blight in South America to ensure the safety of Thailand's rubber planting industry.

 East Africa not only needs to put an end to contact between domestic rubber planting areas and South America, but also needs to cut off direct contact with the four major domestic production areas.

The four major rubber producing areas in East Africa, according to the size of the planting scale, are: Hesse Province producing area, Great Lakes producing area, Lake Turkana producing area (southern Ethiopian Plateau), and Eastern Coastal Plain producing area.

 These production areas are not directly adjacent to each other and are separated by long distances, so it is convenient for East Africa to put its "eggs" in different baskets.

In addition, the banana planting industry in East Africa must also take relevant measures. Banana wilt is also a big trouble, so Ernst hopes that Big Mac bananas can persist in East Africa until the 21st century.

 (End of this chapter)