Why the planters supplying latex product makers aren’t expecting a happy ending

livemint.com:

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. New Delhi: In Kerala’s Njarakkadu village, sandwiched between foothills and the state highway leading to Munnar hill station, is a 15-acre rubber plantation belonging to the well-known Kuzhiyelil family. It is 4:00 am.

The sun is yet to rise, but a dozen men and women troop into the estate. The men have thin white towels wrapped around their heads; the women carry lunch boxes. They get to work using ‘tapping’ knives, making a cut in the bark to collect the sticky and milky latex.

The latex will later be refined and processed to produce tyres, tubes, balloons, toys, mattresses and condoms, among other delights. At about 200 trees per acre, this is not really a dense estate. But there was a time when God’s Own Country was synonymous with prosperous small and medium rubber farmers raking in the moolah.

Just as deposits to the state poured in from expats in West Asia, people who stayed back in Kerala prospered with money from rubber estates. Marriages here were made not in heaven but on estates, and unofficial dowries were decided on the strength of rubber holdings. But those days are in the past.

Over several years now, rubber plantations in Kerala have been battling a series of headwinds: climate change, low productivity, labour shortages, human-animal conflict, unpredictable pricing, and changing customer demands. “While the rubber plantation sector is facing many challenges, one of the biggest problems is low productivity. This is mainly because of changing climatic conditions and nobody really has worked on developing clones," says Venkitraman Anand, former chief executive officer of Harrisons Malayalam Ltd, India’s largest rubber plantation company, which is jointly owned by the RPG