The "prosperity which the early years of the war brought to the United States had a stimulating effect on their automobile industry, and hence on their consumption of rubber. Furthermore, as rubber is an essential war material, large quantities were used for military purposes. The price of rubber during the war years and until the end of the post-war boom was retained at a -remunerative level. Under the stimulus of this remunerative price planting by estates and by natives, both in Malaya and elsewhere, was maintained of a comparatively high level. The post-war slump was the first real crisis which the rubber industry had to face.
The majority of producers had large areas of young rubber, which, lor a few years, could only be a liability to them. They had had no opportunity of accumulating reserves, and many of them were faced with ruin, from which they were saved by the timely adoption of the Stevenson Scheme. had been made during those years to formulate a comprehensive scheme for regulating supplies, the difficulty of regulating the exports of rubber in the Netherlands East Indies was the main stumbling-block to the adoption of any such scheme.
As the depression deepened. however. the financial and economic condition of rubber-producing countries compelled their Governments to make a further attempt to regulate the supplies of their raw commodity products. After prolonged negotiations, the existing regulation scheme wes evolved, and came into force on June 1, 1934. Under this scheme each producing country was assigned a quota, and the percentage of this quota, which can be exported during any period. is determined by the Into national Rubber Regulation Committee, whose headquarters are in London Unlike the Stevenson Scheme, in which the exportable percentage was determined automatically by the price of standard sheet in London (which caused a certain amount of inflexibility of the working of the scheme), the present regulation scheme gives unfettered discretion to the committee in making changes in the percentage. The distribution of the permissible exports among the producers in any country is, of course, left entirely in the hands of the authorities in that country, and an enormous amount of work has been done, and is still being done, by the officials and planters in these countries in attempting to distribute the permissible exports equitably among producers.
In particular, the efforts made by officials in the Netherlands East Indies to register the producers in that country have finally been completed, and as from January 1 last the exports of native rubber from the Netherlands East Indies have been regulated by individual assessments and export rights.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.