The US can support rubber/energy crops the size of corn or soybean with hundreds of thousands of new jobs, says Katrina Cornish of the Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center, and the need is pressing, she notes, because world rubber demand is expected to grow from 12 million tons in 2014 to 30 million tons by 2030 – with as much as 32,817 square miles of rain forest could be destroyed soon to meet the growing demand from conventional sources. That’s an area the size of Austria.
Cornish gave this illuminating overview of the alternatives at ABLC 2017 in Washington.
