Our van stopped at a scenic vista on the contour road where verdant mountains undulated southward toward China’s border with Laos. Stepping out to take some photos, I was overcome by an acrid, unpleasant odor. I asked my local travel partner Xiao Guan what the stink was.

“Money,” he said with a wry smile. “That’s the smell of money, my friend.”

He pointed to a small rubber plantation where latex was being processed. After I took some photos and boarded the van, I noticed rubber plantations everywhere we went.

It was late 2010 and I was traveling through the countryside in the Xishuangbanna Dai Autonomous Prefecture, a tropical area roughly the size of New Jersey in southwest China’s Yunnan province. In addition to being home to several ethnic minorities, Xishuangbanna is best known for pu’er tea, wild elephants and the Lancang River, the Chinese name for the Mekong. Recently, however, Xishuangbanna has taken on a new identity: the land of rubber.

According to a recently released report, land under rubber cultivation in Xishuangbanna nearly tripled between 2002 and 2010 to account for more than a fifth of the area’s total land. And in those years, rubber’s positive impact on local livelihoods, especially among ethnic minorities, has become increasingly pronounced: Traditional wooden homes have given way to modern concrete and rebar edifices and cars have replaced motorcycles. But recent research by Chinese and Western scientists suggests the industry could collapse in the near future if new management strategies are not applied.

So how are the people in this remote corner of one of China’s poorest provinces making so much money off of rubber? The answer is plain to see in Xishuangbanna’s roads and parking lots: cars.

In 2009 China overtook the United States as the world’s largest market for new automobiles and the trend is not going away. The China Association of Automobile Manufacturers predicts seven percent growth in 2013, fuelled by China’s domestic consumption and the growing demand for Chinese cars overseas. China’s car boom not only has created extensive auto-focused supply chains on the banks of the Yangtze and Pearl Rivers, but also has changed the fortunes of farmers in Xishuangbanna. Cars need tires and this mountainous, lush pocket of southwestern tropical China is a crucial producer of natural rubber for China’s massive tire market, which constitutes about one-quarter of global tire demand.

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