Hi friends,

I’ve been working on a web application for Chinese Ministry of Commerce on rubber cultivation and risks will be out soon, and I just wanna share with you the simplified version web map API here. I only have layers here, though, more to come.

Web map application by Zhuangfang Yi: Current rubber cultivation area (ha) in tropical Asia

This web map API aims to tell the investors that rubber cultivation is not just about clearing the land/forests, plant trees and then you could wait for tapping the tree and sell the latex. There are way more risks for the planting/cultivate rubber trees, including several natural disasters, cultural and economic conflicts between the foreign investors and host countries.

We also found the minimum price for rubber latex for livelihood sustainability is as high as 3USD/kg. I define the  minimum price is the price that an investor/household could cover the costs of establishing and managing their rubber plantations. While the actual rubber price is lower than the minimum price, there is no profit for having the rubber plantations. The minimum price for running a rubber plantation varies from country to country. I ran the analysis through 8 countries in Asia: China, Laos, Myanmar, Cambodia, Vietnam, Malaysia and Indonesia. The minimum price depends on the minimum wage, labour availability, costs of the plantation establishments and management, average rubber latex productivity throughout the life span of rubber trees. The cut-off price ranges from 1.2USD/kg to 3.6USD/kg.

We could make an example that if rubber price is 2USD/kg now in the market, the country whose cutoff price for rubber is 3USD/kg won’t make any profit, but the investors in the country might lose at least 1USD/kg for selling every kg of rubber latex.