Six years from planting to first tapping

A rubber tree cannot be tapped when it is young. It needs roughly six years of growth before the bark can carry a cut, and until then a rubber plantation is pure expenditure: land cleared, seedlings raised, workers paid, roads built, and nothing to sell.

The Matouke Rubber Project shows the arithmetic plainly. Launched in 2007, first plantings in 2008, first tapping in 2015. Seven years between the decision and the first drop of latex, on a project designed to reach 6,000 hectares.

It is also why building a plantation means building a settlement. Matouke employs more than 610 permanent workers, and more than 312 camp rooms were put up for them, with generator electricity and drinking water from a borehole running on solar panels. Those went in years before the trees produced anything.

The two later projects, Donga Mantung and Manyu, both started in 2011 and take a different route. Rather than CDC estates, they are designed around 10,000 hectares each of smallholdings, with CDC nurseries on site supplying seedlings. The corporation carries the nursery and the expertise; the grower carries the land and the waiting.