Firestone Natural Rubber Company, LLC is a subsidiary of the Bridgestone Americas, Inc. Headquartered in Nashville, Tennessee, the company operates the largest contiguous rubber farm in the world in Harbel, Liberia, which first opened in 1926.
History
Creation and early history
During the 1920s, the United States access to rubber was restricted by the European colonial powers (Britain and the Netherlands), which held a monopoly in rubber production. Herbert Hoover, then Secretary of Commerce, considered rubber a vital resource due to its usage for car tires and began working with American rubber companies in order to find a rubber source that was controlled by U.S. interests. Part of a Department of Commercesubsidised worldwide search for a place for rubber plantations, rubber magnate Harvey Samuel Firestone sent experts to Liberia in December 1923 to do a soil survey.
In 1926, the Liberian government granted Firestone a 99year lease for a million acres (to be chosen by the company wherever in Liberia) at a price of 6 cents per acre, Firestone then set about establishing rubber tree plantations of the nonnative South American rubber tree, Hevea brasiliensis in the country, eventually creating the world's largest rubber plantation. The United States government was involved in the offshore rubber production operation from the outset, as scholar Christine Whyte point out: "The deal had the approval of the U.S. State Department, who hoped that the huge contract would keep Liberia within the American sphere of influence, without necessitating direct governmental control. The lastminute addition of a twentyfive million dollar loan attached to the concession was intended to ensure that American corporate influence dominated."
The Firestone Plantation was originally envisioned for 350,000 people to be employed on the newly created plantations. However this was more than the number of ablebodied men in the entire nation at the time, which created intense pressure for labor. As early as May 1925 British officials in Monrovia informed their superiors in London of how unfeasible these numbers were and warned that "natives would soon be converted into wage-slaves..." The Liberian government supplied men to create and staff the plantations by giving local chieftains quotas for workers that were impossibly high to meet. Among the men contracted by Firestone, Allen Yancey notoriously coerced men to prepare land in Maryland county for the plantations without pay. Clearing such vast tracks of land displaced many people. In 1929 the Liberian legislature received a complaint from King Maya Gedebeo of Twansiebo that, in addition to destroying nine towns in the area, the Firestone project made people "choose between forced labor and emigration."
As a part of the agreement with Firestone, the Liberian government was given funding to pay the foreign debts it had incurred, and to develop a harbor necessary for rubber exportation. In return for a $5 million loan at a 7% interest rate, Firestone was given complete authority over Liberian revenues until it was repaid. Overtime the loan took a larger and larger portion of government income: it grew from 20% of the total revenue of Liberia in 1929, to 32% in 1930, to 54.9% in 1931 and nearly the whole revenue in 1932. A member of the American Legation in Liberia estimated that Liberia effectively paid a 17% interest rate on the loan.
Scholar Christine Whyte describes the Firestone plantation model in Liberia that emerged in the late1920s and 1930s as a blatant, "export of the “company town” model from Ohio to Liberia. These towns were intended to not just provide worker housing, but also allowed the company to oversee many aspects of employees’ lives. Firestone controlled education, the judicial system, and healthcare provision in the villages established on or near plantations."
During the Great Depression, as rubber price fell, Firestone stopped its development of the plantation (using just 50,000 acres and cutting wages in half), and, depriving the Liberian government of tax incomes, the government missed a loan payment to the company. Firestone asked the U.S. government to send a warship to Monrovia to enforce the debt payment, but President Franklin D. Roosevelt rejected the "gunboat diplomacy".