The looming crisis of natural rubber

In a situation report, the chief executive of Halcyon Agri, Robert Meyer, set out the state of natural rubber supply from inside the trade rather than from the outside looking in.

The picture he describes is the one the figures already point at. Production is not keeping pace with consumption, and the reasons are slow-moving: a producer base of smallholders who plant for a return years away, growing regions under climate and disease pressure, and a replanting cycle that does not respond quickly to a price signal.

What makes it a crisis rather than a cycle is that demand keeps compounding against it, at around 4.7% a year, while the regulatory floor rises at the same time. The EU Deforestation Regulation is fundamentally transforming the industry and the traceability every buyer must now be able to prove.

Read from a factory rather than a plantation, the report is an argument for a second source of the same material, produced somewhere the weather and the map cannot take it away.