NATURAL RUBBER

With a growing share of 8% of the world’s production, West Africa offers an ideal development potential for the production of rubber with its favourable climatic conditions, large areas of available non forest land and farm workers.

African rubber, which stands at 1.1 million tons, is finding a natural outlet in the USA, Asia and European market.

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Natural rubber demonstrates characteristics that gives it a competitive advantage to synthetic rubber: a lower heat generation and a better ability to regain its original shape. Such qualities are essential for tires, an especially for heavy goods vehicles, agricultural vehicles, aircraft and civil engineering. The substitution between natural rubber and synthetic rubber therefore remains limited for such applications.

The share of natural rubber compared to synthetic rubber moved from less than 40% in the 2000s to more than 47% today.

Many industries have ambitious goals to reduce their carbon footprint and raise the renewable material quantities in their products, so the evolution of the proportion natural rubber/synthetic rubber is an opportunity.