• Ever wonder where rubber comes from before it is transformed into tires for your car? Probably not. But despite all the attention we give to oil, the fact remains that regardless of fuel source, vehicles will continue to ride on rubber tires -- and the United States produces no natural rubber, the primary ingredient in all tires. Michelin recently invited iZoom.com to visit its rubber plantation in Brazil for a look at rubber -- its past, present and future.

By Larry Edsall
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Photography by Richard Dole

ITUBERA, Bahia, Brazil

Oil may get all the attention…

Well, actually, it's the volatile location of many of the sources of oil, plus the increasing, and increasingly global, demand for a diminishing petroleum supply, as well as the pollution that results from using so much oil that has everyone scrambling to find energy alternatives.

But whether our cars and trucks, our minivans and sport utility vehicles are powered by gasoline, diesel, ethanol, biofuels, hydrogen, electricity or some as-yet undiscovered substance to be mined on Mars, our cars and trucks and vans and utes will continue to ride on four (or in some cases as many as 18), black and donut-shaped objects that we call tires. And while there are some 200 ingredients that comprise the mixture that produces each of those tires (including several derived from petroleum), the crucial part of the recipe is natural rubber.

But while there's oil in them thar' hills, and in the sea beds and other geologic formations scattered within and around the United States, and while the U.S. remains one of the world's largest oil producers-albeit, of course, it also is by far the world's largest oil user-the 50 states produce no natural rubber. Zero. Zip. Zilch.

"Natural rubber is a strategic raw material used in enormous amounts in over 40,000 applications. The United States, with no natural rubber domestic production of its own, is completely dependent upon imports," reads a report filed by scientists working on a U.S. government-funded research project seeking ways-though what is called "metabolic engineering"-to extract natural rubber from such American-grown plants as tobacco and sunflower.

"The supply of natural rubber to the United States, which uses over 20 percent of the world supply, is threatened by many factors," the scientists warn. "Over 90 percent of global production is in South East Asia. Natural rubber shortages would seriously impact defense, transportation, medicine and consumer markets."

In fact, they continue, "No other high performance elastomers can be used successfully in place of natural rubber in many of these applications.

Then comes the kicker: "Industrial growth in Asia, particularly China, continues to squeeze supplies and drive up prices."

A worker can bleed as many as 900 trees a day.

"It's difficult to think of any other raw material that is as vital and vulnerable," Wade Davis, botanist and author of One River: Explorations and Discoveries in the Amazon Rain Forest, wrote a little more than a decade ago in his book on discoveries and developments in perhaps the world's most biologically diverse and important ecosystem, the only place on the planet where rubber is indigenous.

But what about synthetic rubber? Wasn't its development a big accomplishment during World War II, when our supplies of rubber, transplanted from Brazil to Southeast Asia were shut off? Yes, it was. Davis characterizes the development of synthetic rubber one of the most important "botanical quests" of the 20th Century. He adds that, "had it not been for the Manhattan Project, the $2 billion investment that created the atomic bomb, the synthetic rubber program would been remembered as the greatest technological breakthrough of the war."

Davis notes that months before Pearl Harbor, rubber was the first commodity placed under direct U.S. government control. He explains that gasoline rationing was not instituted so much to save fuel as to conserve wear and tear on the country's limited supply of tires.

"Engineers had two years," Davis explains. "If the synthetic rubber program did not succeed, the nation's capacity to wage war would end."

The development of synthetic rubber was accomplished, and helped the U.S. through the war effort. Today, synthetic rubber remains one of the many ingredients in tires, but it cannot match natural rubber in strength or durability. The larger the tire and the more load it must carry, the more natural rubber required for its composition.

Speaking of that composition, it takes a mature rubber tree a full year to drip out the latex needed to produce a single tire for a compact car. If you put a new set of tires on our full-size SUV, you're consuming the annual output of at least half a dozen trees.

So natural rubber is vital, but what makes natural rubber so vulnerable? Well, for one thing, if you plant a rubber tree today, you have to wait seven years before you can begin bleeding that tree of its latex, and not very many farmers can or are willing to wait seven years for their first cash crop. For another thing, even if they do, there's microcyclus ulei, a fungus better known as the South American leaf blight.

Although 18th century French mathematician Charles-Marie de la Condamine is considered the first European to realize the value of rubber, Christopher Columbus reported new world Indians playing a game with a ball that bounced. Several hundred years after Columbus, la Condamine went to the Amazon to determine the size and shape of the earth at the Equator. To protect his instruments from the wet weather, he painted the cloth bags that held them with what the natives called the white blood of the catoutchouc or "weeping tree." The white emission, latex, hardened into a water-proof covering when exposed to the heat of the sun or the smoke of a fire.

Joseph Priestley, an English clergyman who "discovered" oxygen, the King of Portugal, Charles Macintosh, Charles Goodyear and many others would play roles in the development of rubber and the diversification of its uses. Wade Davis writes that industrialist Andrew Carnegie lamented that instead of steel, "I should have chosen rubber," and that in London and New York, people flipped coins to decide whether to seek gold in the Klondike or the so-called black gold of Brazil.

Horsepower brings latex from forest to collection points

A truck full of raw latex arrives at Michelin's processing center.

Rubber is native to the Amazon. Real rubber trees (members of the hevea species) look nothing like the large-leafed plants sold in American garden centers. They do look like very tall, thin aspens, their trunks covered with light-colored bark. In their natural state, the trees grew widely scattered across an area as large as the United States. Such natural distribution helped to protect the trees from their natural enemy, microcyclus ulei, the leaf blight fungus which could cripple production when the trees were planted more closely together in agricultural-style plantations.

Brazil was the world's exclusive supplier of natural rubber until 1876. Then, in a plot worthy of an international spy novel, an Englishman, Henry Wickham, operating in behalf of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, exported some 70,000 rubber tree seeds, seeds that would beget the rubber industries in Asia and Africa.

As late as 1910, Brazil still produced half of the world's natural rubber, but within a decade that figure reduced to 20 percent. By the outbreak of the Second World War, less than 2 percent of the world's rubber came from its original source.

Nonetheless, Brazilian rubber remains the world's best in quality, and the Brazilian rubber industry began a slow commercial comeback after biologist James Weir grafted stems from virus-resistant trees onto trunks of susceptible but high-yielding plants in 1936.

Such research continues today, led by CIRAD, a French governmental research center (the centre de coopération internationale en recherche agronomique pour le développement) that specializes in enhancing tropical agricultural development, and by one of the world's largest tire companies, Michelin, which not only is working to increase the supply of Brazilian rubber but to bolster the economic base in this region of the Bahia state, where Michelin also is turning much of its land holdings back to its natural and biologically diverse state as part of the Atlantic rain forest (see adjacent story below).

Michelin has had a presence here, some 15 degrees south of the Equator and just inland from the Atlantic Ocean, since the early 1980s, when it purchased a rubber plantation that Firestone planted soon after WWII. Michelin, which also owns a larger plantation, Mato Grosso, in southwestern Brazil, and has a 20-percent equity in plantations in three African countries, calls this facility the Ouro Verde (Green Gold) Project. The plantation's hilly landscape spreads over more than 22,000 acres (35 square miles) that include nearly 4000 acres of Atlantic forest, one of the world's most endangered but biologically diverse ecosystems where new species of plants and animals are being discovered on an impressively frequent basis.

But in the 1990s, Michelin had to make a decision about what to do with its Bahia plantation, which was suffering a double whammy-a low cycle of international rubber prices and a fungus outbreak that significantly reduced the local flow of latex.

It considered either selling the plantation or switching to a different crop, such as palm oil, a big business in this part of Brazil. But it didn't like either alternative. As a tire maker, it had no interest in entering new fields of agriculture, nor did it feel good about the prospect of abandoning its employees or the forest.

Instead, it decided to use the Bahia plantation as a Western prototype for the proliferation of small and medium-sized farms, much like the model that produces most of the rubber in Southeast Asia. Such a move, says Michelin managing partner Michel Rollier, fulfilled Michelin's commitment to encourage sustainable development, an effort that extends well beyond the company's annual staging of Challenge Bibendum, the international showcase for more environmentally conscious transportation, or Michelin Challenge Design, an annual contest that in recent years has focused on making roads safer for everyone who uses them to get from place to place.

To help make rubber growing more attractive for family farmers, Michelin's ensuing research efforts concentrated on making trees more resistant to the fungus and to finding a way for farmers to survive in the face of the ups and downs of international rubber price fluctuations.

So far, its joint research with CIRAD has found 14 fungus-resistant varieties of hevea. It also has developed what it considers to be an ideal crop mix that provides farming families with on-going income: devoting a portion of each farm to bananas, which produce an almost immediate crop, and using the space between the rows of rubber trees to plant cocoa, a relatively short and bushy plant that produces seed pods from which chocolate is produced. Cocoa flourishes in the light shade of the rubber trees, and a new cocoa plant provides fruit by its fourth year.

This multi-crop agronomic model is being showcased not only to farmers living in the area around the plantation, but through a decision in 2003 to split the plantation itself into a dozen mid-sized and privately owned farms, each of around 1000 acres. The dozen plots were sold to Michelin's local employees, a group that became known as the "chosen 12," chosen from among the 21 employees and numerous others who sought the land.

To help get the new farmers off to a good start, Michelin underwrites the mortgages and guarantees an annual minimum income for the first 10 years. Michelin also retains acreage for its research, and is turning a long, narrow portion of the plantation into the largest private preserve in the Atlantic forest with a 30-year goal of allowing that land to return to its natural state. Michelin also maintains its raw rubber processing plant that prepares the latex for shipping to production facilities in Brazil and elsewhere.

Paulo Roberto Lima Bonfim (below) is among the "chosen 12" who grows cocoa in the shade of his rubber trees, with bananas providing a steady cash crop

So far, the results are impressive: With motivated private farm owners, rubber production has increased significantly. At the same time, instead of Michelin employing 250 workers on its plantation, the 12 mid-sized farms, with crops of rubber, cocoa and bananas, employ twice that number.

"We're committed to follow the ladder of responsibility," says Paulo Roberto Lima Bonfim, an agronomist engineer who, in addition to owning one of the medium-sized farms, continues to serve as communications and human resources manager for the Michelin facility where he has worked for 18 years.

He notes that the ladder of responsibility-to the forest and to the local residents- was raised by Michelin itself, which decided not to turn its back on the local employees but instead underwrites their eight-year mortgages and assures them a market for their latex.

In response, Bonfim has followed the crop diversity plan devised by Michelin researchers and has added bananas and cocoa plants to his land, and instead of the 18 local workers needed to maintain rubber trees, he employs 45 people and, like Michelin, he and the other 22 members of the coop created among the new owners (11 husband and wife teams and one farmer who is unmarried) have agreed to pay their employees nearly three times the local minimum wage. The coop negotiates with the workers' union, negotiates prices for the rubber the group sells and helps maintain some 750 miles of unpaved roads that run through and connect what are now their farms.

"I am very motivated and happy to be part of this project," Bonfim says, adding that income already exceeds projections.

The chosen 12 aren't the only local residents that Michelin is encouraging to grow more rubber. For the area's many independent family farmers working smaller plots of land, Michelin is providing more than information on the switch from monoculture to the diverse mixture of crops; it's supplying rubber trees and the Brazilian government is offering the cocoa seedlings. There also are low-interest loans from the federal development bank and technical assistance from Michelin and state and federal governments. Some 1000 families will participate in the program this year.

Michelin also worked with the local government bodies and Brazilian regional banking interests to create an NGO (non-governmental organization) to manage a project that over the course of three years will to build 250 units of new housing, to be occupied by the people working on the former plantation. In an area where houses usually are built from materials such as mud-chinked wood or weak but expensive ceramic brick, the Nuovo Itubera community introduces sturdy yet less expensive cinder block construction techniques

Despite the song lyrics, that ant really can't move a rubber tree plant. But Michelin and its partners here think they can move the local rubber industry toward a much more prominent role in the world supply chain, at the same time providing sustainable economic development and protecting the region's natural biodiversity.

Scientist Kevin Flesher (below) points to the canopy of the Atantlic rain forest, where the reserve created by Michelin includes the huge Pancada Grande waterfall

Research and restoration

The sad truth is that the conditions of climate, soil, elevation and all the other natural conditions that are most ideal for the growing trees that produce the world's best natural rubber also provide an ideal environment for microcyclus ulei, the dreaded South American leaf blight, a fungus that attacks those very rubber trees, causing their leaves to drop and preventing the photosynthesis needed for the light-colored bark to produce a good flow of latex.

Just as the seeds of the hevea trees that are native only to Brazil were smuggled out of the country more than a century ago, so, too, can the leaf blight travel across national borders and oceans.

"If it spreads it would be an ecological, economic and social disaster," says Dominique Garcia, who heads the microcyclus research project taking place here in a joint effort between Garcia's employer, CIRAD, the French government's centre de coopération internationale en recherche agronomique pour le développement, and plantation owner Michelin.

Garcia adds that an Australia group that studies such things rates the potential spread of microcyclus among the 10 worst threats to international agricultural commerce. He also notes that because of modern means of transportation, the fungus already has shown up on continents where 93 percent of the world's natural rubber is produced.

Because both the rubber trees and the fungus are native to Brazil (trees growing in Asia and Africa can be traced back to seeds smuggled out of Brazil in 1876), this nation is the focus of research to develop trees that are resistant to attack.

Research takes place both in a laboratory and on nearly 2500 acres where trees undergo field testing on the Michelin plantation. In the laboratory, more than 100 strains of the fungus are being studied and classified by their virulence. In the field, 3000 new trees are evaluated each year. So far, 14 fungus-resistant varieties have been identified.

Through grafting, sort of like a botanic vaccination, productive rubber trees can absorb fungus-resistant characteristics. In the meantime, more naturally fungus-resistant strains of trees are being developed, though Garcia notes that it can take 20 years of research to verify that a new strain will, indeed, prove resistant enough to be recommended for widespread planting.

Controlling the fungus and producing stronger trees is only one focus of the research taking place at Michelin's Green Gold project, where one of the few nearly virgin areas of the Atlantic rain forest is being allowed to return to its natural state.

For 10 years, Kevin Flesher, who holds a PhD in ecology and evolution from Rutgers, has been hiking through the forest, where, he notes, "it's the age of discovery," with visiting graduate students discovering new species on an astonishing frequent basis. For example, Flesher offers one student who, while on his very first visit to the forest, discovered a previously unidentified species of butterfly.

Virus studies in the lab help produce healthy grafts for trees in the forest

This forest is among the most biologically diverse places on the planet, he adds. For example, there are 100 species of frogs and toads "and that doesn't include the canopy, that research [up in the tree branches and leaves] is just starting."

Already, he said, scientists have discovered as many as a thousand species of insects in the canopy of a single tree, and he notes that there are more species of trees in this forest than in the entire United States.

Fisher, who used to work for the Smithsonian Institution and who considers himself a landscape ecologist and biological geographer, says that from a botanically perspective, the fight against the leaf blight fungus is the biological equivalent of the battle against the AIDS virus.

"It's a real exciting time in Brazil to do research," Flesher adds.

Garcia and his team in the lab would agree.