MELAKA: The clock shows 7.30am, and daylight has just broken over the trees and small rise around Ab Manap Minhat’s house. The 65-year-old steps out of his home, clad in a thick, long-sleeved shirt with long pants tucked into his boots.
While many livelihoods have been ravaged by the COVID-19 pandemic, this year has been a bumper year for rubber glove manufacturers in Malaysia, as the fight to contain the disease led to a surge in demand for latex surgical gloves and other latex medical products.
However, for the lives of people such as Faridah and Manap, there appears to have been little trickle-down effect in terms of income. “We would go out, start tapping rubber at 2am in the morning, and then we’ll be back around 6am to pour formic acid into the cups to make the latex coagulate faster.” During the last week of August this year, Manap said 1kg of rubber cup lumps could only fetch RM2.10. And at times, the tappers said they had been offered as low as RM1.70 per kg.MAKING ENDS MEET
“The towkay is licensed by the Malaysian Rubber Board, so he looks after Jasin, Tehel and the surrounding areas,” Manap told CNA, when asked if the middleman was licensed by the government. From all these efforts, plus whatever money his children, all grown up send to him, Manap gets about RM1,500 a month.
“Luckily, my wife, who is also a smallholder and I both got some financial aid as smallholders. And we live in the kampung, our lifestyle is not so expensive,” he said. This incentive is limited to Malaysian smallholders with less than 100 acres and have a Rubber Transaction Authority Permit issued by the Rubber Board.
However, DOSM noted that this was a 30.4 per cent decrease compared to July 2019, a fact also noted in the Rubber Board’s statistics. Currently, Malaysia imports latex from all over the world, to make up for the shortfall in local production. This is borne out by Rubber Board statistics, which showed a constant drop from over 200,000 tonnnes in 2006 to 36,193 tonnes of latex in 2019.
Rubber production has shifted from the more labour-intensive latex sheets, to simple"cup lumps" which are easier to produce with a longer shelf life, but also affects their price per kilogramme. However, it is noteworthy that what is publicly listed is merely a reference for licensed rubber merchants and manufacturers’ purchasing arms.
“It’s proximity to Malaysia and the general oversupply in the market that have contributed to prices in Malaysia being relatively low in recent years,” Mr Leong said.