The Para rubber tree seedlings planted at…

The Para rubber tree seedlings planted at the Royal Botanical Gardens from Brazilian seeds gathered in 1876 by Henry Wickham had been sent to Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Indonesia, Singapore and British Malaya.

Malaya (now Malaysia) is later to become the biggest producer of rubber.

Rubber plantations in Asia are much more efficient and soon outproduce Brazil.

This is because the Asian rubber plantations are organized and well suited for production on a commercial scale, whereas in Brazil the process of latex gathering from forest trees remains a difficult extractive process: rubber tappers work natural rubber groves in the southern Amazon forest, and rubber tree densities are almost always low, as a consequence of high natural forest diversity.

Moreover, experiments in cultivating rubber trees in plantations in the Amazon show them to be vulnerable to South American rubber tree leaf blight fungus and other diseases and pests.