Rubber Tree

A tree crop, Hevea brasiliensis, the Para rubber tree, native to the Amazon rainforest, the source of nearly all natural rubber long before it was formally cultivated in plantations. Commercial plantation cultivation began after 1876, when Henry Wickham smuggled rubber tree seeds out of Brazil to Kew Gardens in England, from where seedlings were sent on to British colonial territories in Ceylon and Malaya and later to Dutch-controlled Sumatra, ending Brazil's near monopoly on natural rubber and shifting the center of world production to Southeast Asia. Before plantation cultivation took hold, wild rubber extraction in the Congo Free State under the personal rule of Belgian King Leopold II relied on brutal forced labor from the 1880s through the early 1900s, a documented atrocity in which large numbers of Congolese people died or were mutilated under a forced quota system, among the darkest chapters in the history of any cultivated crop. Thailand, Indonesia and Vietnam are among the largest modern producers of natural rubber.