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Thailand Rubber
In 1901 British planters introduced rubber trees into the
Malay Peninsula, where the soils and climatic conditions were
highly suited to rubber cultivation. In Thailand early government
restrictions on foreign investment led to development of the
industry by local smallholders, usually subsistence rice farmers
who were able to start rubber tree stands on the relatively
abundant free land in the area. Land under rubber cultivation
expanded rapidly in the 1930s, consisting mainly of smallholdings
controlled by Chinese, Thai, and Thai Malays rather than large,
European-owned plantations, as in other Asian countries. Thailand
had about 1.6 million hectares in rubber in the mid-1970s, of
which about 10 percent were located in an area along the Gulf of
Thailand southeast of Bangkok. Of the 500,000 holdings in the
early 1980s, about 150,000 were under 2.5 hectares in size, and
another 300,000 were under 10 hectares. The remaining larger
holdings were operated more as expanded smallholdings than as
plantations. Production was increasing in the early 1980s and had
reached about 830,000 tons in 1987. An extensive replanting
program, in which old tree stock was replaced with new high-yield
varieties, had reportedly been carried out in about half the
planted area by the mid-1980s, significantly increasing the
potential for expanded production.
Data as of September 1987
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