Rubber production in Southeast Asia
How can rubber smallholders adapt to global challenges?
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Rubber
Natural rubber is the leading biosourced elastomer. It accounts for 48% of the global elastomer market. It is mostly (80%) produced by family farms of between 0.5 and 10 hectares, mainly in Asia. CIRAD is working to improve smallholder rubber growing, particularly by adapting it to climate change, and helping players in the value chain produce more while preserving the environment.
Remits
Through its research, CIRAD supports producers and other stakeholders in the value chain .
- Increasing the added value of small-scale rubber growing by means of planting material suited to growing conditions, appropriate crop management sequences, and territory management.
- Adapting rubber growing to future climate change, particularly abiotic stress .
- Proposing disease control methods, particularly against the fungus Microcyclus ulei .
- Implementing ecological intensification of rubber growing, in other words improving productivity while protecting the environmen .
- Determining the qualities of natural rubbers suited to different uses (tyres, industrial rubber, health, aeronautics) .
Expertise
- Agro-economic assessments of agro-industrial cropping systems; recommendations tailored to climatic conditions, planting material and plot physiological condition.
- Socioeconomic analyses.
- Assessment of carbon balances and fluxes on a plantation ecosystem scale.
- Micropropagation: cloning of whole plants and rootstocks.
- Clonal recommendations, clone certification.
- Soil analyses.
- Natural rubber standardization and certification, milling processes, analyses of natural rubber structure and quality.
- Analyses of mRNA (transcroptomic) expression.
A platform in partnership for research and training on rubber
Products and services
- Latex diagnosis: a tool to optimize plantation productivity and sustainability and boost financial margins.
- Products and services centring on rubber
Training
Higher education
- Rubber growing and breeding (AgroParisTech-ISTOM).
- Chemistry and bioprocesses for sustainable development (l'institut Agro - Montpellier SupAgro, Ecole de chimie de Montpellier).
Vocational training
Related news items
All news items
Results & impact 13 December 2021
Rubber production: How can soil health be restored after clear-cutting of a 40-year-old plantation?
Science at work 13 September 2021
For a sustainable and resilient rubber sector in Southeast Asia
Institutional news 15 June 2020
AFD and CIRAD commit to develop sustainable management of large agricultural and forestry plantations in four ASEAN countries
See also
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Sugarcane
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Coconut
Revitalizing coconut, a plant with a thousand uses: knowing and making better use of its genetic diversity and ensuring sustainability, from production to processing.