But, that the west would have to develop long-term natural rubber sources for the future. Never again could the U.S., particularly, be caught in the situation where it was so dependent on one geographic region so far from the U.S. for such a critical commodity. At the end of the war the Allies were terrified that the Japanese might introduce the leaf blight to the rubber plantations of Malaysia as an act of terrorism, but that did not occur. Further, when radial tires were developed in the 1970s a new dependency on natural rubber was created since radial tires, evidently, according to Davis, the dominant nature of all modern tires, cannot be made with synthetic rubber, but demands natural rubber. This latter surmise came before the development of radial tires and their need of natural rubber, and before the 1973 oil crisis which drove the price of oil up dramatically.
All synthetic rubber is petroleum based.
So, that's the story as it touches Haiti. I am curious if any of you know more about this rubber planting in Haiti and what ever happened to it. I take it that it is not a rubber tree, but a smaller plant that nonetheless produces latex. The structure of this book is odd. Wade Davis and a slightly older student of Schultes, Timothy Plowman, are in the Amazon region of South America, particularly Columbia and Peru, studying coca plants in the 1970s and early 80s.