At present the cost of production of Para rubber is 72 cents, including the export tax, which amounts to 24 cents. This high cost is partly due to the cost of living, partly to difficult transportation, partly to scarce labor and inefficient methods of gathering the rubber. Mr. Akers recommends the importation of 50,000 Chinese coolies, the employment of a number of Malayan planters to instruct the collectors in the best methods of tapping, and the abolition or, at all events, reduction of the export tax. The Brazilian government has given a large sum of money to improve navigation on the Amazon and to provide premiums for the construction of rubber factories and refineries, engaging to buy from these refineries all the rubber required for the army and navy. They doubtless feel chary about reducing the export tax, as it is a great, if not even the greatest, source of revenue.
The future of the rubber industry causes anxiety not only to the Amazon district and those interested in it, but to the thousands of stockholders in eastern plantations. The great demand for rubber for automobile tires caused a boom and, according to The Economist, £40,000,000 was invested in boom prices "whose only justification is the few years of grace before the supply surpasses the demand." On September 20, last, the same paper remarks:
The collapse of the rubber boom is one cause for the lack of business in the Stock Exchange. Hundreds of thousands of pounds poured into the plantation rubber industry by the British public are represented by huge stocks of certificates, the depreciation on which, reckoned from the price at which the public got them, will serve as a painful lesson till the next boom, from whatever quarter it may spring up, comes along.
A large meeting of the leading people in the rubber world was held in London on October 23, and stocks went up just before the meeting, only to fall when it was learned that no solution of the difficulty could be found. The cost of bringing an estate into bearing condition is between twenty and thirty pounds an acre, and The Economist estimates over seven hundred thousand acres in the East capitalized at from £54 to £76 an acre.
It will not pay to produce rubber to sell in the world's markets at two shillings a pound, unless the cost of production can be reduced. In some very favored estates, in Ceylon, the cost is only sixpence a pound and, when all the trees are yielding, the average cost may be 8d, though in 1911 it was Is. 4d. Mr. Akers considers that in Java the cost will not go below Is. 2d. for several years. In Ceylon labor is more easily obtainable than in the Malay States and Java. In the Malay States a good deal of the labor is done by coolies from southern India along with some Chinese. An economic question arising here is the relative value of indentured and unindentured labor.
The artificial production of rubber is not yet a matter of commercial
