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FRONTLINE
|August 5, 2016
Trade liberalisation policies and integration of domestic and market prices of natural rubber have severely affected rubber cultivators of Kerala and Tamil Nadu.
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RUBBER TAPPING in progress in a plantation in Kerala. The majority of rubber cultivators are smallholders owning less than 0.55 hectare and employing skilled labourers for harvesting and processing.
A SENSE OF ANXIETY AND HOPELESSNESS pervades the rubber tracts of central Kerala and southern Tamil Nadu, where rubber growers speak with surprising clarity about how their lives are being ravaged by international crude oil prices, weakening currencies of rubber-exporting countries, a slump in the global demand for natural rubber, indiscriminate imports of the commodity and the business strategies of tyre companies.
Trade liberalisation policies and integration of domestic and world market prices of natural rubber since 1994 are among the reasons for the worst crisis facing the rubber plantation industry. Early this year, prices of natural rubber reached the lowest level in recent history, threatening the lives of more than 12 lakh small and medium cultivators, and labourers and traders engaged in the sector.
By 2005, when suicides among small and marginal farmers in many parts of India, including Kerala, were leading to debates about how liberalisation had adversely affected domestic prices of farm products, the rubber sector alone appeared to have somehow escaped the fate, witnessing a price boom after several years. The price of premium grade rubber sheets (RSS-4), for example, rose from around Rs.40 a kilogram a few years earlier to Rs.66 a kg in 2005 and fetched Rs.250 a kg by the middle of 2011, a record in the history of the commodity.
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