Describing the distribution of rubber producing countries, indicate the major environmental issues faced by them. (UPSC CSE Mains 2022 - General Studies Paper 1)
Natural rubber contributes to deforestation, biodiversity loss, pollution, and more. But climate change and disease also threaten natural rubber producing countries.
- There are 28 countries worldwide that produce natural rubber.
- The most distinct characteristics they share is a tropical climate.Tropical climates with consistent temperatures around 25-30 degrees and rainfall of 200 cm support healthy rubber trees .
- Countries with this ideal equatorial climate that produce natural rubber are found primarily in south America ,Africa ,and southeast Asia.
- for decades Thailand has been the worlds biggest producer of rubber , growing 35% of worlds natural rubber supply in 2019 .
- The top five countries that produced the most rubber in 2019are Thailand ,Indonesia , Vietnam ,India and china.
Environmental issues
- Deforestation-growing natural rubber is leading cause of deforestation in mainland south Asia
- Biodiversity loss . rubber is grown by deforestation of equatorial vegetation which are known for their species biodiversity .
- Climate change -deforestation of equatorial vegetation which are known as lungs of the forest will affect the carbon sequestration and this accentuated the rate of global warming
- Diseases -rubber being a monoculture plantation is highly vulnerable to pest attacks and diseases .
- Man animal conflicts -monkey human conflict in tripper because of deforestation of land for rubber plantation.
- Cases of stealing of land from indigenous communities .
- Pollution – sulphate are released from latex processing facilities (latex are extracted from rubber trees )
- a large-scale of natural rubber plantation results in environmental issues such as the Nitrous oxide (N2O) emission which is obtained from the use of synthetic fertilizer during the cultivation process.
- The postulate of Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) was employed to examine the relationship between economy and environment from the natural rubber plantation in major producers using secondary data ranging from 2005 to 2018.
- Therefore, the N2O emission in which represents environmental degradation was regressed with the value of natural rubber production as the proxy for the economy growth using a fixed effect model on the panel data regression analysis.
- Results show that there is an inverted U-shape curve from the relationship between the N2O emissions and the value of natural rubber production. Hence, this study supports the postulate of EKC’s hypothesis.
- In addition, results found that the average value of natural rubber production from major producers was not yet reached the turning point of EKC.
- Some suggestions were made in order to increase the productivity while maintaining yet reducing the emission obtained from the use of synthetic fertilizer during cultivation process.
The best way to ensure more responsible production of natural rubber is to grow trees for rubber production on low quality degraded land instead of clearing high quality natural forests to plant them.
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