#rubber trees

Excerpt from this story from Mother Jones:

These are just three examples among hundreds of one of the biggest, but least discussed, causes of tropical deforestation. The spread of rubber plantations is driven primarily by our demand for more than 2 billion new tires each year. The full devastating impact of this has been exposed by a new analysis of high-resolution satellite images that can, for the first time, distinguish rubber plantations from natural forests.

But even as the true environmental cost of the ubiquitous rubber tire is being exposed, the damage could be about to escalate sharply. The new culprit is electric vehicles. Being substantially heavier than conventional vehicles, they reduce the life of a tire by up to 30 percent, and so could raise demand for rubber by the same amount.

Natural rubber is a milky latex harvested manually by tapping the bark of the Hevea brasiliensis, a tree originally from the Amazon that is now grown widely in plantations, especially in Southeast Asia. World demand has been rising by more than 3 percent a year. But with no sign of increased yields on plantations, that requires ever more land to keep pace.

Yet there has been little outrage. While growers and processors of other tropical commodity crops, such as soy, beef, palm oil, cocoa, and coffee, are under ever greater pressure from both regulators and consumers to show their products are not grown on land deforested to accommodate them, rubber has escaped public attention. When did you last see deforestation-free rubber tires advertised?

One reason for this environmental blind spot is that the truth has not been able to be seen by the remote-sensing systems used to track changing land use in much of the tropics. Unlike with other commodity crops, even the most assiduous analysis of satellite images of forest regions has been unable to distinguish the foliage of monocultures of rubber trees from the canopies of natural forests.

Until now.

A new international analysis published in October has for the first time used high-resolution imagery from the Sentinel-2 earth observation satellites, launched by the European Space Agency, to accurately identify rubber plantations. “The results have been sobering,” says lead author Yunxia Wang, a remote-sensing specialist at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh.

She has found that between 10 and 15 million acres of tropical forests, an area larger than Switzerland, has been razed in Southeast Asia alone since the 1990s to feed our hunger for rubber. This is three times more than some previous estimates used by policymakers, she says. It makes the crop a worse deforester than coffee or cocoa and closing on palm oil for the top spot.

New Post has been published on https://www.chiangraitimes.com/thailand-national-news/southern-thailand/southern-thailands-rubber-plantations-hit-by-fungal-disease/

Southern Thailand's Rubber Plantations Hit by Fungal Disease

A key rubber tree-growing area in Thailand has been hit by an outbreak of a fungal disease called Pestalotiopsis. The fungal disease could halve the area’s output, the country’s rubber authority said on Monday.

Thailand is the world’s top producer and exporter of the natural rubber, accounting for up to 40% of global rubber supply.

Pestalotiopsis, has spread into Thailand after hitting rubber plantations in neighboring Indonesia and Malaysia. The three countries account for around 70% of the world’s natural rubber production.

The Rubber Authority of Thailand said the disease, causes leaves to turn yellow and spotted as it spreads. It was recently found in three districts in Narathiwat, a key rubber growing province in southern Thailand.

Fungal Disease Threatens Output

Krissada Sangsing, director of the agency’s rubber research institute, said the disease threatens to cut output in the affected areas by up to 50%. The agency also told Reuters that damage was estimated to be around 100,000 rai (16,000 hectares) as of Sunday.

“We are committed to preventing this disease and containing it from spreading further,” Krissada said.

Older rubber trees are also more vulnerable to the fungal disease. It causes the trees to eventually lose 90% of their leaves and affects their ability to produce latex, he told Reuters.

Rubber farmers in the south were “very worried” about losing output amid falling rubber prices, said Uthai Sonlucksub, president of the Natural Rubber Council of Thailand.

“It spreads so fast. The trees are all bare and cannot be tapped at all,” Uthai told Reuters.

“Farmers in the affected districts are losing their income.”

The disease currently affects around 382,000 hectares of rubber plantations in Indonesia. Especially parts of Sumatra and Kalimantan, according to the International Rubber Consortium (IRCo).

Indonesia also revised its natural rubber production this year due to the outbreak, expecting output to drop by 15%.

New Mad Trapper is so sick.

Prepare to be torn a new asshole

As mentioned last week, I was just recently able to start sorting through the remaining photos from our trip to Thailand back in January. Since travel photos and groupings can be so open-ended, I’m still working on it! But in the meantime, I’m going to keep this post purely visual again with some of the photos that really stuck out to me…enjoy!