Natural Rubber is a commodity which continues to have a resounding impact on our lives and plays a disproportionately integral role.  Like crude oil, natural rubber has played an indispensable part in driving the economies of many countries and in shaping the lives of consumers.  Hence the influence of organizations connected with these commodities such as IRSG for natural rubber and OPEC for the oil industry, is great and far reaching.

Rubber has always held an important place in society. Before its ‘discovery’ by Columbus during his second voyage to the New World in 1493-6, it featured in the economies and religious ceremonies of the early American civilizations. After almost 250 years as a scientific curiosity, methods of using it in the manufacture of useful goods began to be explored. In the middle of the 19th century its industrial use became arguably the last major addition to the industrial revolution. The production of natural rubber has exerted profound effects on many societies, notably the wage-slave economies of Brazil and the Belgian Congo in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the development of rural economies in the countries of South-East Asia since the 1920s. It has therefore naturally attracted the attention of governments through their concern for the economic well-being of their populations, initially through the colonial system which led to the control of production of natural rubber by the three colonial powers: France, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.

The rubber plantations in South-East Asia began to dominate the rubber supply from about 1912, and were able to produce and sell rubber profitably in the years up to the end of the First World War, but oversupply coupled with the severe post-war economic recessions reduced the price of rubber to uneconomic levels. The voices of the planters were raised in exhortation of the then powerful colonial governments to take steps to rectify the situation. A number of schemes were proposed, but all required the co-operation of planters in all the rubber-producing territories, and this proved almost impossible to achieve. Eventually, in November 1922 the British Government introduced the Stevenson Scheme to control the production of rubber from the estates in Malaya and Ceylon. Hindsight confirmed the predictions of some opponents of the Scheme: it was ill-conceived and ill-timed, and was abandoned in 1928 after Malaya’s share of the world rubber market fell from 53% in 1922 to 38% in 1927, with a corresponding rise in the share of rubber exports from the Netherlands East Indies, their major competitor.

The price rise which had precipitated the end of the Stevenson Scheme was, however, like many since, only short-lived. By 1933 the price had crashed to unremunerative levels, well below the costs of production even in the Netherlands & East Indies, and this brought international agreement among the producers to control the level of output. The International Rubber Regulation Agreement was signed in May 1934, setting quotas for the

production of each of the signatory countries, who collectively accounted for over 90% of the world rubber production. The Agreement was successful in keeping prices stable, and was financed by an export tax or cess, which provided funds for the collection of statistical data by the Secretariat of the International Rubber Regulation Committee, based in London, and for research into new uses for rubber.

Not unnaturally, consuming countries objected strongly to the formation of what were effectively a producers’ cartel, and Germany, the USA and the USSR in particular made vigorous attempts to escape reliance on natural rubber from the then colonial sources. These efforts led to the expenditure by the major rubber-consuming companies in the USA of enormous sums in attempting, with varying success, to establish its own rubber-producing facilities in Brazil, Liberia and the Philippines. Additionally, research into the production of synthetic counterparts of natural rubber was intensified in these countries, and led to important collaborative agreements between companies in Germany and the USA, paving the way for the successful development of the synthetic rubber industry in the 1940s.