Many different forms of peach palm have been selected and domesticated by indigenous people, resulting in a broad range of colors, oil content, taste, fruit size, and shape. In recent times, the plant has been domesticated for the production of palm hearts in plantations in Costa Rica and Brazil, where it is now an agricultural crop. Seringueira is one of the most important plants of the Amazon Valley and is known to the rest of the world as rubber. The trees can grow up to 40 m in height, in the wild, but when introduced into plantations the trees cease growth at 25 m. The most important product of this plant is latex, obtained from the conduction cells and tapped by cutting into the trunk.
Botanists currently recognize nine species of Hevea.
Hevea brasiliensis is the most important, but others have resistance to diseases such as the South American Leaf Blight. This plague has resulted in major devastation to rubber trees planted in the Amazon region. Thus, by growing different species, disease problems could be overcome. The industry based on harvest of wild trees collapsed with the introduction of cultivated rubber to the Old World tropics in the early 1900s, and today there is limited production of wild rubber in the Amazon. Local harvest cannot compete with the mechanized, modern plantations established in countries such as Malaysia, and, for the moment, the production of rubber in the Amazon Valley is of minor importance.