Rubber and the Making of Vietnam: An Ecological History, 1897–1975 (Flows, Migrations, and Exchanges)

by Michitake Aso

kinds of Rubber Goods for Mechanical purposes.”11 In addition to industrial needs, new mass consumer items such as the bicycle stimulated increases in rubber consumption. Throughout the nineteenth century, Kirkpatrick Macmillan and others steadily improved designs for a foot-peddled machine, or velocipede, promising faster travel. Its market was limited, however, by the lack of quality roads, particularly in the United States. Solid rubber tires existed but offered only slight comfort. In 1845, Robert William Thomson took out a patent on a pneumatic tire, but it was so unpromising that the idea sat virtually unnoticed until John Dunlop independently reinvented such a tire in 1888. Coinciding with the “safety bicycle,” which included rear-wheel propulsion, front-wheel steering, reduced wheel size, and diamond frame, the pneumatic tire promised freedom for the masses. The following year, the Dunlop Rubber Company and the Michelin Company began to produce pneumatic tires and bicycle sales boomed, as the product reached frontier areas such as the U.S. Midwest.

In the twentieth century, the automobile drove a surging desire for rubber. In 1895, there were only 350 cars in France, 70 in Germany, and almost none anywhere else; soon afterward the automobile became a mass-produced item. These automobiles required ever-growing amounts of rubber for their tires and other parts, a demand largely met by the rubber plantations of Southeast Asia. As latex production shifted from South American and African forests to Southeast Asian plantations, European capital and Asian labor quickly replaced varied landscapes with geometric plantations.

It is sometimes difficult to distinguish between contemporary multinational companies operating plantations and the previous plantation complex.

Rubber and the Making of Vietnam focuses on embedded practices and the process in which ideas and actions came to be grounded in social and material environments. The production of rubber was not merely a social affair, and to keep the latex flowing, humans had to negotiate their relationship to nonhuman nature, ranging from the transplanted hevea tree to plasmodia-bearing mosquitoes. I analyze the ways in which certain environments and social configurations retain “lessons” of the past, thus enabling certain behaviors while constraining others.

Colonial states established the legal, economic, and transport infrastructure necessary for planters to appropriate land and plant rubber. The incorporation of Indochinese forests into networks of exploitation and conservation, the instituting of European land tenure regimes, and the setting up of new practices of mobility and immobility all paved the way for plantations to replace forests.

The alternation of dry and wet seasons had important consequences. First, mosquitoes bred during both seasons, but were more numerous during the change in seasons. Second, the extended dry season limited the attack of parasites and fungi on hevea. Europeans were initially worried that the extended dry season would not allow the maximum growth of hevea. But, French planters argued, unlike the ever-wet Brazilian rainforests, Cochinchina’s dry season eliminated many of the pests of hevea.52

Early in a plantation’s life cycle, death and disease were widespread among workers and managers; planters often viewed labor as expendable and saw little reason to invest in their physical well-being. But as the trees came to maturity, more highly skilled workers became a priority, and the yearly production of rubber depended on a content, trained workforce that could consistently tap latex without destroying trees. Companies gradually sought ways to retain workers, and the reproduction of the workforce became a bigger concern.

Planters portrayed the Montagnards and their use of fire as an existential threat to plantations, but the Montagnards played a key role in establishing and maintaining plantations by providing necessary labor. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, European planters, experts, and colonial officials valued fire differently, depending on whether it was used to clear land for plantations or for swidden agriculture, reflecting the dichotomy between “indigenous” and “European” agriculture.

The focus of the concessionary rush was terres gris and terres rouges, terms which were as much political, economic, and cultural constructions as they were classifications of the physical and chemical properties of soils. These characteristics, however, played an important role in promoting terres gris and terres rouges as valuable commodities, encouraging investment, and managing the land. The first region, terres gris, was located for the most part close to Sài Gòn. These soils were sedimentary in origin and contained a high percentage of sand. This sand content meant that these soils drained well and were less exposed to malaria, as the habitats favored by Anopheles mosquitoes, carriers of malaria plasmodia, were less common. With a high silicate content, these soils also had a lower cation-exchange capacity (i.e., the ability to store positively charged nutrients such as potassium, phosphorus, etc.) than the terres rouges and were therefore more easily exhausted by the growth of plants with a high nutrient demand, such as tobacco. Often these soils were used for wet-rice agriculture, which recycled many of the essential micro- and macronutrients.

French authorities began to look seriously at educational reorganization in the wake of anticolonial uprisings that took place in 1908, and were connected to schoolteachers in Tonkin and Annam. The trauma of World War I encouraged imperial powers to adopt an educational policy that spoke of native development as much as of imperial gain.

Warfare had an important, if sometimes difficult to evaluate, impact on the physical and biological environments of Việt Nam. In terms of rubber, political and social violence kept plantations from expanding and encouraged the continued production of rubber on large plantations. Plantations, in turn, influenced the fighting of the Vietnam War, or the American War as many Vietnamese called it. Plantations were liminal spaces that brought together nature and culture, north and south, peace and violence, and rubber production remained an important ideological and material battleground from 1963 to 1975.

The ramp-up in violence caused by the U.S. military’s full entry into the war in 1965, which included massive herbicide sprayings, bombing runs, and procurement of plantation space, eventually made rubber production in southern Việt Nam impossible.

Plantation owners also responded to the growing environmental awareness of the 1960s by marketing their rubber as “natural” as opposed to “synthetic.” They made a distinction between rubber that was produced using hydrocarbons derived from petroleum products (dead plants) and rubber made from latex produced by living trees. In this new terminology, “natural” rubber was a renewable resource, unlike “nonrenewable” petroleum.