Michelin plantation an oasis in sea of poverty

from The Globe and Mail

The Ouro Verde co-operative is researching a unique type of rubber tree 'cancer'

MICHAEL BETTENCOURT

ITUBERA, BRAZIL -- It may have taken three planes, a bouncy bus ride and about 18 hours of travel time to get to Itubera, Brazil, but it took only about two minutes of staring into the mouth of a thundering waterfall at Michelin's rubber plantation in the Atlantic rain forest to realize that this place was much more than a rubber factory.

Set in the middle of a largely unknown jungle, one that happens to produce lots of rubber trees, the waterfall is the centrepiece of Michelin's Biodiversity Research Centre in this remote Brazilian area about 200 kilometres south of Salvador, near the Atlantic coast.

When the waterfall wasn't drowning out conversations, its misty fog soon soaked visitors who ventured out on a narrow observation dock to witness its power close up.

The falls marked the spot where, in late 2003, Michelin went from being a rubber producer in the Bahia province, to a community builder of the area, one of the poorest in Brazil. That's when Michelin embarked on its Ouro Verde co-operative, literally "green gold," a project that encompassed developing new low-cost housing and medical facilities for the plantation's workers and families, furthering advanced research into a unique type of rubber tree "cancer" that is globally feared outside its native South America, and promoting scientific study of the Atlantic rain forest, the virtually unknown southern neighbour of the famed Amazon rain forest.

Three-thousand hectares of the Atlantic rain forest is a natural reserve that Michelin has protected with security forces from poachers, and opened up to study by scientists from all over the world. It promises new discoveries of plant life and even small mammals, as well as its own local ecological research efforts.

The plantation also is organizing some leading-edge social development efforts for both Michelin employees and others contracted to local rubber producers, many of whom are now partners with Michelin, which supports them with loan guarantees and tree-farming research.

If that "green gold" project name has the cynic in you assuming that it was simply Michelin's way of making more money in the area, think again. "By 2001, there were so many dead trees in this region, it caused Michelin to question whether the project was sustainable," said Gerard Bockiau, the director of Michelin's Brazilian plantations.

At the time, and to this day, the rubber trees in the Amazon and Atlantic rainforests were being hard hit by a plant disease called microcyclus ulei, or South American leaf blight, which not only killed many trees, but also made the remaining rubber trees much less efficient, producing about half the latex per tree of that which Asian rubber trees produce.

So even with numerous advances in disease resistance, it would still have been considerably less expensive to shelve the project and get on with more efficient sites elsewhere in the world.

"The first and most obvious solution would have been to sell it all," Bockiau said. "But selling it wouldn't guarantee the preservation of this part of the rain forest, and simply wouldn't be the Edouard Michelin way," citing the former Michelin co-chairman, who died in 2006 in a boating accident at the age of 42, but whose legacy remains as a social and environmental leader in an industry often maligned for its environmental practices.

The project also serves as a template for various Michelin projects in developing nations around the world, including in Africa and Asia, where more than 90 per cent of the world's rubber is produced. It's in nations such as China, Malaysia, and Indonesia, as well as parts of Africa, where the great fear is that this fungus will spread to those hevea (rubber) trees, which would spell major upheaval for Michelin, the rubber and tire industry as a whole, and the global economy, environmental experts say.

"If it passes to Asia and Africa, it would be an ecological and economic disaster, affecting three million jobs," said Dominique Garcia, a researcher with the global agricultural consulting group CIRAD, the Centre for International Co-operation in Agronomic Research for Development, based in Montpellier, France.

"With the globalization of the transportation industry, it's only a matter of time that this fungus passes to other parts of the world."

Research into fighting the leaf blight has been going on for 15 years, with the facility evaluating new mixes of native and resistant seedlings every year; the most promising of these are grown into a new type of rubber tree hybrid, which takes a full 20 years.

The research is helping local producers to increase their incomes as well as their rubber production, and will become a key global initiative should the fungus reach southern Asia in particular.

"One tree here makes about five kilograms of rubber per year," said Bockiau, "which is about the rubber needed for one tire on a small car."

Living on the plantation is a relative oasis in a desert of poverty for the 3,500 workers, as the co-operative town effort is a joint project by Michelin, local governments and private NGOs (non-government organizations).

So far, the project has set up a school, a medical clinic and a dentist's mobile office in the area, none of which existed prior to Michelin's purchase of the plantation from Firestone in 1984.

"This village had no water systems or electricity, no phone service," Bockiau said. "In three years, we'll have offered 264 excellent-quality houses [which cost about $7,000], a day-care centre, a shopping mall and recreation facilities - even mobile phone companies are now covering this area."

The $292 (U.S.) a month income that most of the tree tappers receive may be paltry, but it's considerably higher than Brazil's minimum wage of $133 a month, or $1,600 a year. Neither figure would be enough to live on in fashionable Rio or Sao Paulo. But with incomes growing through the planting of secondary crops such as cocoa that produce more quickly than the seven-year startup cycles of rubber trees, workers are literally harvesting the rewards of their productivity growth.

The natural riches of this part of the rainforest are also being discovered now, said Dr. Kevin Flescher, Michelin's director of the Biodiversity Research Centre in Brazil.

"We're in the Stone Ages when it comes to knowing the Atlantic rainforest," said Flesher, an ecology and evolution researcher who specializes in studying medium- to large-sized mammals. "Everybody's discovering new species here."

The facility has about 35 researchers studying various plants, insects, birds and wildlife, with Michelin providing both accommodations and research grants. "We have about 1,000 years of research yet to do."

Those black gumballs that hold up your car may not look very interesting to you, but if you know the years or decades of research, planning and people stories that go into getting them to you, while preserving the natural environment they come from, all of a sudden they become much more interesting.

globeauto@globeandmail.com