The new rubber boomlet

BRAZIL’S first rubber boom, sparked by the invention of the car, ended abruptly with the successful cultivation of the rubber tree in Asian plantations. Its second, supplying the Allies after Japan cut off their rubber sources during the second world war, barely outlasted the fighting. Both made millionaires of rubber bosses—and near-slaves of those who tapped and cured the latex. Now, in the Amazon’s most remote regions, rubber is making a tentative comeback. This time the rubber-tappers are trying to write the script.

The murder by ranchers in 1988 of Chico Mendes, who led the rubber-tappers’ struggle against loggers and ranchers, sealed an alliance with environmentalists. It also planted seeds of change in Acre, Mendes’s home state, which has been run by self-styled “governments of the forest” since 1999. They have helped extrativistas—forest-dwellers who harvest sustainable products—to form co-operatives, to diversify beyond traditional crops of rubber and Brazil nuts and to seek new markets.