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Slowly but inexorably plantation rubber production climbed. It was only three years after the orgiastic peak of the Amazon Valley boom, in 1913, that plantation rubber production overtook wild. Always superior because of controlled quality, it pushed wild rubber from expanding markets till, in the peak year of 1934, out of a world production of 1,019,000 tons Brazil contributed but 9,000 tons, a catastrophic 0.89%. In Iquitos, Peru, upriver from Manaus, docks fell into disrepair. Manaus grew clean and hungry. The State of Amazonas defaulted both internal and external debt regularly each year.
That Brazil, with a potential rubber-growing area of 1,400,000 square miles out of the world's 2,300,000, now supplies less than 1% of world production nettles President Vargas. That bright, chipper dictator has two ideas: that war stoppage of East Indies rubber supply might restore wild rubber's lost market; that if Brazilian rubber can be grown on Malayan plantations, it can be grown on Brazilian plantations as well. To be sure Henry Ford's Brazilian rubber plantations have encountered many difficulties, little commercial success so far, but Vargas thinks this is because Ford's effort is not yet on a production basis.
Vargas' plans:
1) Clear malaria out of the Amazon basin, settle hardworking, nonmigratory families there with Government aid.
2) Improve wild rubber production. Inferiority is not inherent, is caused by ignorant siringueiros indiscriminately tapping any or all of 14 different varieties of rubber tree, so that the bacia (caldron) produces a hybrid bolacha. Remedy: teach them to confine themselves to the Hevea brasiliensis and scientific tapping of trees.
3) Crude Brazilian smoking methods require 30 days to make a bolacha; East Indian methods, ten. Remedy: import from U. S. thousands of machines (cost: $15 each) recommended by Goodyear experts to speed up processing.
4) Chop down trees of poor types, replacing with best types.
5) Select special areas for standard rubber seedling plantations.
6) End the old racket of debt slavery practiced by storekeeping aviados. Vargas recently organized the Instituto Agronomico do Norte whose job it is to wean the siringueiros from their bad production and economic habits.
Those who expect synthetics some day to push rubber off the market entirely, those who think the Mexican guayule bush a better bet, looked dubious; but Vargas was confident. That he had rubber-worried Uncle Sam behind him to some extent was indicated by the fact that at Manaus he received exhaustive reports from experts of the U. S. Department of Agriculture working in conjunction with private experts from Goodyear. In Belem, Vargas lunched with John Ingle, head of Goodyear's Crude Rubber Division, who flew there from Akron as guest of Vargas' golf partner, Brazil's dynamic, smart, supersalesman, Valentim F. Boucas. Observers thought Goodyear would probably accept an invitation to establish an experimental station in Pará, might even build a plant. It looked as though Uncle Sam were already beginning to hedge against Pacific blockade.