Rubber Production to Grow 50% by Year’s End

After government official announced last month that they were expecting rubber production to quintuple by 2020, a regional rubber growing association said that total production was set to grow by 50 percent this year alone. Through the first nine months of 2011, total rubber production grew to 35,400 tons, a 35.1 percent increase compared to the same periods last year, according to early estimates by the Association of natural Rubber Producing Countries (ANRPC) obtained yesterday. According to the same data, ANRPC expects that total production for the year to reach 63,300 tons, a year-on-year growth of 50 percent. Mak Kimhong, president of the Association for Rubber Development of Cambodia, said that the country currently uses about 181,400 hectares of land for rubber, producing about 40,000 to 50,000 tons of latex rubber annually. “The government aims at expanding to 300,000 hectares of land for rubber,” he said. “In the future, there will be more rubber produced in our country as more and more farmers take interest in plantation.” Likewise, rubber exports are expected to grow 47.9 percent for the year, as the country is expected to ship 63,000 tons of its stock. While the outlook of rubber remains promising, prices on the markets have progressively decreased since April. SMR20 natural rubber traded at $3,636 per kg in Kuala Lumpur on Tuesday, a 24.25 percent de-crease from a high of $4,800 on April 11, according to the most recent ANRPC data. “The current dip in natural rubber prices has not been caused by any major change in the commodity’s demand-supply fundamental,” ANRPC secretary-general, Dr kamarul Baharain Basir, said in the ANRPC September trends and statistics report. “Growing global economic concerns have impacted [natural rubber markets] through absence of speculative investments, fall in crude oil prices, and weakening of currencies of the three major natural rubber-exporting countries.”