The Establishment of Regulation

THE account now to be given of the establishment of regulation in the various producing territories is but the barest summary of the most important provisions of the mass of local legislation which introduced restriction. Enactments, ordinances, and decrees, running into hundreds of pages for the larger territories, were an inevitable feature of a vast scheme controlling estates, smallholders and dealers whose numbers reached six figures in Malaya and possibly seven in the N.E.I. The History of Rubber Regulation mentions, with something not unlike pride, that in Ceylon the Rubber Control Handbook comprised some 376 pages. This complexity proved a considerable hardship to smallholders and small estate owners, most of whom were illiterate and certainly unable to grasp lengthy documents in involved legal language, the interpretation of which was further complicated by the practice of the inclusion of powers which the authorities did not propose to exercise except in certain contingencies. Efforts to explain, to the smallholders the gist of the local legislation were generally insufficient, and there is copious evidence of the smallholders’ failure to understand important provisions of the regulation, and of the financial losses they suffered as a result. 1