This innovative book shows how a fungus changed the course of Brazilian history. Warren Dean demonstrates convincingly that leaf blight (Microcyclus ulei), and not demographic and social conditions, caused the collapse of Brazil’s dominant position in the world rubber market in the decades after World War I. Marshalling an impressive body of scientific literature together with traditional historical sources, Dean completely recasts the story of Amazonian rubber through the perspective of environmental history. While concentrating on Brazil, he places the struggle for rubber in a global context, highlighting the need to examine plantation agriculture as a biological, as well as an industrial, process. He shows that previous efforts to attribute the collapse to the inadequacies of local capitalists, recalcitrant workers, machinations of foreigners, or combinations of the three, have ignored crucial ecological factors.
Dean demystifies the exploits of Henry Wickham and the transplantation of Hevea brasiliensis in the 1870s, first to Kew Gardens, and thereafter to Asia. Wickham’s controversial shipment of seedlings provided the genetic stock for the immense plantations in Ceylon and Malaya which reduced Brazil to a minor role in the natural rubber market by the 1920s. In British and Dutch Asia, planters industrialized rubber cultivation. In Brazil, a widely dispersed labor force (seringueiros) gathered rubber from its natural habitat in the rainforest under primitive conditions. They then sold their rubber to intermediaries who later sold it to exporters. The Asian rubber plantations presented Brazilians with a challenge: modernize primitive production techniques or stagnate. Dean emphasizes the astounding in difference of the Brazilian government to the Amazonian problem, and the lack of government support for efforts to save an export that, at its height, had provided 40 percent of all federal revenue.
Brazilian capitalists who tried to implant modern plantation production were doomed to fail. Even dynamic capitalists and multinationals (notably Ford) saw their plantations ravaged by the fungus. Although endemic to Brazil, the blight did not appear as long as the Hevea trees remained scattered in the rainforest. The large-scale planting of rubber trees destroyed this delicate natural balance, and triggered the appearance of the devastating blight that destroyed the plantations. This South American leaf blight has yet to appear in Asia.
Despite worldwide research for the past half-century, no one has been able to solve the problem of the blight and to make plantation rubber production possible in Brazil. Meanwhile, the old rubber elite has maintained its control over the inefficient and inhumane system of gathering natural rubber in the rainforest. Dean argues that Brazil’s inability to modernize natural rubber production has hampered development by depriving the country of revenue and import capacity. He concludes that continued efforts to conquer the blight are well worth the cost. This excellent revisionist work should stimulate more research on ecological factors in Latin American history.
