MALAYSIA'S RM15 billion rubber export industry, its second largest commodity production after palm oil, traces its commercial lineage to a motley confluence of ancient civilisation — Christopher Columbus, the coinage of "rubber", the latex machine and an English botanist.
The ancient Mesoamerican Olmec civilisation known as the "rubber people" were the first to create a, usable rubber product. Christopher Columbus brought home myths of Haitian Island people in the Caribbean playing with a "bouncing" ball made of a tree glue.
Charles Goodyear invented vulcanised rubber that is resistant to swelling and abrasion, with great elasticity over high temperatures.
Edward Nairne accidentally grabbed a cube of sap to remove his pencil markings, inadvertently creating the first eraser.
Stephen Perry invented the humble rubber band, Thomas Hancock's latex machine softened, mixed and shaped rubber into consumer products, and Joseph Priestly put it all together — when the material he concocted could "rub out" pencil marks, the eponym "rubber" was struck.
In British Malaya, Henry Nicholas Ridley, in promoting rubber trees with such zealotry that he was nicknamed "Mad Ridley", established latex harvesting and tapping methods that preserved a rubber tree, while also inadvertently being responsible for the peninsula's deforestation and the Great Floods of 1926.
As these marvelous pivots converged, the Malaysian rubber industry boomed, from its halcyon war years to the 1990s decline.
Despite major production that propelled the country into a rubber global power, the industry waned due to declining prices and over-reliance on smallholders.
Until 2020, rubber suddenly hit an unlikely renaissance: the Covid-19 pandemic gifted an unwitting lifeline over strong demand for gloves, initially doubling, but significantly declining last year after the disease waned worldwide.
Now, rubber manufacturing employs 117,000 workers across 1.4 million hectares of plantation with a weighty blotch: 420,000 hectares being abandoned or untapped.
Cheers then to Plantation and Commodities Minister Datuk Seri Johari Abdul Ghani's ambitious programme to revitalise the industry. His plan? Consolidate the rubber land into generating 585,000 metric tonnes of natural rubber annually by unifying multiple agencies into a single collaboration.
It's an idea whose time has come, considering that it stood on this incongruity: Malaysia is the 8th largest natural rubber producer, but it is also a net importer of about a million tonnes to meet the needs of its manufacturers.
It won't be easy but it's long overdue. Issues like improving labour conditions and production practices must be tackled. There is also the issue of securing a sustainable supply in a complex supply chain, where 90 per cent of natural rubber is produced by smallholders.
Pulling this off will wedge Malaysia into a solid footing in a US$300 billion global industry that produces 40,000 products, many we take for granted.
Johari's programme can be Malaysia's next generation rubber renascence.