The Felling of the Trees: Natural Rubber’s Network of Gendered Labor and Care

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“The trees are young,” the arborist Khun Phorn said quietly, his dark gray bucket hat shielding his eyes. He looked up at the field, the rubber trees’ thin branches swaying gently in the breeze, their trunks splotched in color. A rustling of oblong green leaves wrapped around us, punctuated by the clanging of a chainsaw starting up, the machine gasping for breath, its oil low. A cloud of blue smoke billowed out from the dense canvas of emerald. This scene, the vibrant landscape depicting the interplay between humans and the environment, is a window onto natural rubber’s expansive, interconnected network of gendered labor, kinship, and care in a shifting climate reality.

The three hundred rubber trees, only twelve years old, stretched up towards the sun, a rare sight in the unseasonably rainy dry season. While the western coast of Thailand usually looks forward to a short four-month respite from the torrential rains of the wet season, in early 2022 the rains persisted through the dry months, flooding neighborhoods, eroding the beaches, and rotting the rambutan fruit blossoms. The decimation of the rambutan crop led to heavy losses for southern small-holder farmers, who often plant fruit alongside rubber or oil palm, the fruit supplementing income as the commercial trees mature and enriching the soil with vital nutrients. Rubber trees take about seven years before they can be tapped, while oil palm trees require about two to three years before they will produce fruit. 

In 2022, the changing environment had served as a central topic of discussion in the southern province, the intensifying rains impacting multiple sectors of the economy. “You can’t cut rubber in the rain,” the owner of the field where Khun Phorn’s team of male arborists were working had shared earlier one evening as he sliced into a tree diagonally, the white sap bubbling out of the bark. The sap followed his line, dripping down from the lower end along the trunk and finally into a black collection pot. His wife added, “The liquid goes everywhere,” the sap becoming slippery, runny. In a climate where the rainy season is expanding, this becomes an additional challenge. Concern about the profitability of rubber in a changing environment coincides with concerns about family finance and security, kinship ever wedded to economics.

Rubber trees require a lot of care. This care includes both the everyday practices intended to provide for others, and the ways that someone or something comes to matter. To be financially viable, the trees must be cut every day. And, as the owner of the field described, “They like cool weather,” the cool weather making the wood more pliable and increasing the sap production. This means that the trees must be cut in the night or early morning. Most of the time, the labor of daily cutting is performed by migrant workers from neighboring Myanmar, who occupy a precarious position in Thailand but a central place in the Thai economy. 

The migrant workers will head out in the darkness in teams of two to cut between the hours of 1:30 to 4:30 a.m., sometimes residing in simple lodgings provided by their employers situated on the remote plots. The tree-cutting teams will typically be mixed gendered, but men often fill additional physically demanding positions during the day hours. They will work, for example, as wage laborers on construction sites, the embodied, arduous labor physically depleting. Women migrant workers instead have come to play a central role in negotiating hours, wages, and living conditions with their employers. From handling nearly all of the communication with their Thai employers, who are both small-holder farmers and larger corporate owners, and organizing migrant workers’ trainings on social security for their extended kin networks in collaboration with local NGOs, women migrant workers tirelessly toil for the security of their families, their gendered labor and care forming another key component of the natural rubber industry.

Oil palm, on the other hand, is viewed by small-holder farmers and landowners as “easy to care for” (ดูแลง่าย duu lae ngai). The squat trees devour water, but otherwise require little attention or labor, save for the application of nitrogen-heavy fertilizer every three months. Moreover, as the owner of the rubber field shared, the selling price of oil palm had risen significantly as compared to the price of rubber, enticing many small-holder farmers in the region to abandon their rubber fields for palm as a form of family provisioning. The shift towards oil palm in the region looms large, calling rubber’s extensive interconnected network of gendered labor and multivalent care into question. 

The chainsaw whirred up again. Khun Phorn stood to the side as his worker dug through the wood. The tree toppled forward. Healthy, young. It landed on the earth with a thud, the fallen tree just one of the casualties of a changing industry and climate. The tree’s thin body was linked to myriad affective and gendered forms of care and attention throughout its lifecycle, from the nightly labor of tapping provided by migrant workers to the labor of the arborists in bringing the tree down. The care that made this rubber tree “difficult to care for” is enmeshed in relations of kinship, finance, and gendered labor, relations that are being reconstituted and redefined in the tree’s absence. 

Maja Jeranko and Anika Jugovic-Spajic are section contributing editors for the Association for Feminist Anthropology.