The green transition that is devouring Southeast Asia
There is a contradiction that the West prefers not to see. While the electric car is presented as a symbol of ecological modernity, a decisive part of its supply chain still rests on a mechanism of environmental and social devastation built on monocultures, land dispossession and the destruction of tropical forests. Natural rubber, an essential component in tyre production, is becoming one of the darkest points of the so-called green transition.
The problem is only technical in appearance. Electric vehicles are heavier than combustion-engine cars. The weight of the batteries accelerates tyre wear and increases the frequency of replacement. In France, an electric car in 2025 weighs on average 1.7 tonnes, compared with 1.2 tonnes for a petrol car. For plug-in diesel hybrids, the average weight rises to 2.3 tonnes. This leads to one very concrete consequence: tyres wear out 30 to 40 percent faster. And if the pace of replacement rises, the hunger for natural rubber inevitably rises with it.
Rubber as a strategic raw material
The automotive industry still depends massively on the rubber tree. Nearly two centuries after the invention of tyres, this material remains indispensable for several crucial components. Around 70 percent of global natural rubber production ends up in tyre manufacturing. We are therefore dealing with a strategic raw material, divided among major global groups: Bridgestone, Michelin, Goodyear, Continental, but also Asian giants less familiar to the wider public such as Hankook and Kumho.
The problem is that rising demand does not simply mean more production. It means brutal pressure on territories that are already fragile. Southeast Asia has become the great reservoir of global rubber because it offers the ideal climate: heat, humidity and vast agricultural land that can be converted. As a result, production has surged. Over one decade it has doubled in Myanmar, increased fivefold in Cambodia and tenfold in Laos. Behind these figures there is not merely agricultural growth. There is a territorial restructuring imposed through methods that closely resemble the old colonial economies.
The forest cut down in the name of clean mobility
The real price of this expansion is deforestation. Since 1993, more than 4 million hectares of forest have been cleared in Southeast Asia to make way for rubber plantations. The mechanism is simple and brutal: bulldozers advance, forests retreat, local communities lose their land and are pushed into marginal areas or forced to become labourers for the very companies that dispossessed them.
Here the environmental tragedy intertwines with the social one. Entire indigenous communities are uprooted from their territories. Families that once lived from subsistence farming find themselves working as latex tappers on plantations built on land that once belonged to them. It is a dynamic that combines land grabbing, economic subordination and the destruction of ecological balance.
Monocultures, chemicals and instability
The rhetoric of “natural” rubber is another mystification. Plantations are not forests. They are intensive monocultures, fragile, vulnerable to disease and pests, sustained by the heavy use of chemical fertilisers, herbicides and pesticides. The soil is impoverished, loses structure and retains less water. A recent study on the Mekong basin showed that the expansion of rubber plantations has increased soil erosion fivefold. In a region already struck by intense rainfall worsened by climate change, this means multiplying landslides, mudslides and floods.
The issue, therefore, is not only about forests. It is hydrological, agricultural and human. The destruction of forests does not only erase biodiversity. It alters the water cycle, destabilises the ground and makes societies already exposed to growing climate shocks even more vulnerable. Myanmar and Thailand are already paying the price through increasingly frequent catastrophic events.
The opaque supply chain of the major groups
At this point, the responsibility of the major tyre multinationals comes into focus. The leading brands continue to hide behind the complexity of the supply chain. But opacity is not an excuse. It is part of the problem. The world leader Bridgestone admits that it knows the origin of only 42 percent of the farms supplying it with raw materials. That figure alone measures the weakness of controls and the enormous space left for irresponsibility.
Investigative journalists have traced commercial links between wholesalers involved in deforestation and major international brands. Among them appears the Vietnam Rubber Group, which supplies names such as Bridgestone, Goodyear and Kumho. Downstream, these tyres end up on vehicles made by the main car manufacturers. Audi chooses Bridgestone for its electric sport utility vehicles. Renault uses Goodyear and Kumho. But when the decisive question arises — the concrete origin of the rubber — silence returns.
Europe retreats precisely when it should act
In this context, the European attitude appears particularly grave. There is a regulation that should oblige companies to prove that imported rubber does not come from deforested land. It would be an important tool for breaking the link between European consumption and Asian devastation. Yet Brussels has already postponed it more than once, justifying the delay by citing the administrative burden on companies. It is a formula that now returns in every strategic dossier: faced with the need to impose serious constraints on global supply chains, Europe prefers simplification to control, flexibility to responsibility.
France, for its part, has also abandoned plans to impose an extra tax on heavier electric vehicles. The result is paradoxical. On the one hand, a model of mobility that increases tyre consumption is encouraged. On the other, the instruments that could contain the environmental damage of the supply chain are relaxed or postponed. In other words, demand is being supported without correcting its hidden costs.
The false innocence of the transition
The rubber case reveals a broader truth. The energy transition is not innocent. Changing the engine is not enough to change the model. If the industrial system continues to operate according to extractive and predatory logics, the result will not be a true ecological conversion, but a relocation of devastation. Pollution may appear to decline in wealthy countries while it increases elsewhere in the form of deforestation, erosion, labour exploitation and social destruction.
Rubber thus becomes the symbol of an incomplete and hypocritical transition. The West celebrates the electric car as a solution, while shifting a growing part of its material costs onto the forests of Southeast Asia. The narrative changes, but not the balance of power. The vocabulary changes, but the subordination of productive peripheries to the imperatives of the global market remains.
A political lesson
The issue is not only environmental. It is about power. Tyre multinationals, car manufacturers and European governments share a common responsibility: they have built a supply chain in which proclaimed sustainability coexists with strategic blindness. And when politics refuses to impose transparency, traceability and strict limits, it leaves the strongest actors to define the rules.
In the end, the lesson is clear. So-called clean mobility, if it continues to rely on tyres that devour forests, on opaque supply chains and on plantations imposed on local communities, does not represent a break with the past. It represents only an updated version of it. More elegant in its communication, more sophisticated in its justification, but no less violent in substance.
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