the AmericasRay F. Dawson1

Additional index words. Cinchona, cloud-forest species, bark, anti-malarial, abortifacient,plantation technologies, international trade, Guatemala

Summary. Quinine, oldest of the anti-malarials still in use, and quinidine, an anti-arrythmic,have been extracted from Cinchona bark since about 1823. Exploitation of natural stands ofCinchona in the Andes led to several attempts at plantation production. Of these, the mostsuccessful were in Netherlands Indonesia (Java). Just before World War II, a cooperativeeffort to develop technologies for successful cultivation of Cinchona in the western hemi-sphere was undertaken by the governments of the United States and Guatemala, a majorpharmaceutical firm, and four Guatemalan coffee planters. Cultural requirements of thiscloud-forest genus were ascertained, and selection of clones for superior yield and diseaseresistance was achieved. Guatemalan plantings continue production despite the excessivelycyclic nature of the market.

Long before the Spaniards conqueredAndean America, the indigens knewabout the antimalarial properties ofCinchona bark. For 300 years fol-

lowing the conquest, tropical residents aroundthe globe consumed dried and powderedbark to treat “fevers.” Quinine, the activeprinciple, was isolated first by Pelletier and

1Consultant in tropical agriculture (retired). 40 Palmer Avenue,Winter Park, FL 32789

Caventou in 1820. Shortly thereafter, indus-trial-scale extraction and distribution of thealkaloid began on both sides of the AtlanticOcean. In 1898, J.W. Englandwrote a reportto the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy en-titled “The American Manufacture of Qui-nine Sulphate.” According to this report, theindustry began in Philadelphia with Farr &Kunzi, followed by George Rosengarten and,eventually, by Powers & Weightman-alldestined later to be absorbed by Merck &Co., of Rahway, N. J.

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Figure 1. Cinchonastands in upslopesequence: last-harvestedand now coppicingtrees; old seed trees;earlier-harvested stand;trees in flower just below cinder cone ofvolcano.

In Philadelphia, the industry reached itspeak in 1897, when 320 tons of dry bark wereimported from South America. Evidently,this did not suffice to meet demand, for 6.5tons of quinine sulphate were brought induring the same year. By 1897, imports ofbark had fallen to 127 tons, but those ofquinine sulphate had soared to 85 tons. Nearlyall the latter came from a vigorous extractionindustry that had grown up in Germany. J.W.England’s lament of 1898 over the loss ofAmerican industry to foreign competitors iscuriously similar to those heard today.

During the 19th century, the market forquinine was driven by needs of Europeancolonials, who were expanding into humidtropical regions where malarial parasites wereendemic. Eventually, supplies of wild barkdiminished as natural forests of Cinchona inPeru, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Colombia wereexploited. Tropical planters everywhere, al-ways alert for alternatives to cane, cotton, andcattle, considered planting Cinchona onmarginally profitable hill lands. The first suchattempts suffered from lack of prior technol-ogy; but eventually colonial governments ineastern Africa, Indonesia, Ceylon, India, andthe Philippines achieved varying degrees ofsuccess. Margaret Kreig has described someof these efforts in her book “Green Medi-cine.” The more successful were the under-

takings in eastern Africa, which suppliedGerman extraction facilities, and eventuallythose in Indonesia, which supplied Nether-lands interests. At the end of World War I,Germany lost its African holdings. TheNetherlands held its plantations in Java untilJapan invaded the region in World War II.Following that war, German and Dutch firmsestablished virtually a complete monopoly ofproduction, pricing, and sales of quinine, aswell as Cinchona bark. Principal players wereBoehringer of Mannheim, Buchler GmbH ofBraunschweig, and Amsterdamische ChininFabrik (A.C.F.).

Just prior to World War II, the Dutchmonopoly became the target of considerablepublic and official resentment in the UnitedStates. To offset somewhat the unfavorablepublic image,, the Netherlands interests es-tablished a quinine research foundation inNew York with Norman Taylor, a well-knownhorticulturist who was director of the BrooklynBotanic Gardens. Taylor’s task was to provideinformation aimed at increasing the medicaluses of quinine and, in the process, to supportresearch projects at medical schools on thesame subject. At the close of World War II,the Netherlands interests expected to regaintheir former plantations in Java and to rees-tablish the earlier position of trade leadership.Wartime neglect of the plantations on Java

American Society for Horticultural Science18

and the rise of unfriendly nationalism thereprevented this reestablishment. The founda-tion was terminated, and Taylor retired witha memorable Indonesian-style dinner andspeeches at the Netherlands Building inRockefeller Center. A similar fate befell atleast temporarily, the Cinchona plantations ineastern Africa and India as these regionsshook off the colonial ties to European gov-ernment.

A key element in the Javan success storywas the persistent and systematic develop-ment of plantation technologies adapted toCinchona cultivation by Dutch agriculturists(Taylor,. 1945). Eventually, however over-production arose to plague the main pro-ducers. Following discovery of the mosquitoevector of malaria, improvements in publicsanitation did much to reduce dependencyon quinine. Prices fell, and efforts to main-tain a profitable industry became even morestringent. For consumers, the inelasticity ofsupply and price that resulted was felt mostkeenly when threat of military conflict justi-fied stockpiling. Thus, Japan’s conquest ofIndonesia in 1942 shut off 95% of the worldsupply of quinine and quinidine. The West-ern allies were confronted with a severeemergency.

Frederic Rosengarten, Jr., (1944) wrotethe “History of the Cinchona Project of Merck

& Co., Inc., 1934-1943.” The project tookthe form of a first serious reconnaissance ofthe possibilities for growing Cinchona in thehemisphere to which it is native. As early as1932, the U.S. government had becomeuneasy over the virtually complete depen-dence upon sources far removed from NorthAmerica and vulnerability to arbitrary controlof supply and price on the one hand and tomilitary conquest on the other. Noting thatMerck’s predecessors had pioneered quinineproduction in the United States, the gov-ernment urged Merck to take the lead role.

From the outset, emphasis was on thegeneration of plantation production tech-nology. Extraction and purification of qui-nine and quinidine held the status of ancientarts-the problem was to produce the barkin required amounts and with a sufficientlyhigh quinine and/or quinidine content tomake extraction profitable. In 1933 Merck purchased select seed from growers in Javaand chose Guatemala as a principal site forexperimentation. Wilson Popenoe well-known tropical horticulturist, and then di-rector of field research for the United FruitCompany, assisted Merck in organizing andplanning the new undertaking. The resultwas a well-conceived, cooperative ventureinvolving the government of Guatemala theState and Agriculture departments of the

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Figure 3. Drying barkis pulled into rainshedsat night. United States, Merck, and a group of accom-

plished coffee growers-Gordon and OwenSmith, Lind Pettersen, Walter Lind, andPercy Davies. An experimental program wasdevised that focused on the selection andclonal propagation of vigorously growing,high-assay trees as well as on cultural tech-nologies. To the best of my knowledge, noneof the group had attempted before to growcloud-forest species on a plantation scale,Hence, little or nothing was known of thephysiological and environmental require-ments of the plant. A sequence of specialistson aspects of plant ecology, propagation,pathology, hybridization, and general physi-ology was brought in to solve unitary prob-lems. However, there was needed someoneat the head who had the ability to analyzeproblems, perhaps intuitively, as the aroseand thus to choose the most suitable andeffective visiting specialists as rapidly aspossible. For this position they chose BorisAlexander Krukoff, forester and field bota-nist, a one-time member of the Czar’s army,and a driven individual. His life has beensummarized by Landrum (1986) for theNew York Botanical Garden. I met Krukoffin 1944, and carried on a voluminous corre-spondence with him over the next 30 years,much of which related to technical problemsof Cinchona cultivation.

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One of Krukoff's early efforts was toobtain from Japanese-occupied Java, by meansnever revealed, a complete set of the periodi-cal titled CINCHONA. With characteristicpresumption, he passed the pile on to me with“orders” to translate all relevant papers fromDutch into English for use by his project. Ispend one summer at home in Princetonlearning to read Dutch and accomplishingthe task assigned to me. The information sogleaned was summarized in the Annual Re-view of Biochemistry in 1948. Thus began myapprenticeship in tropical horticulture.

Shortly thereafter, Norman Taylor’sfoundation provided funds for hiring a re-search assistant, and I began to experimentwith the physiological requirements of Cin-chona, first at Princeton and subsequently atColumbia. Although the Cinchona tree was arefractory experimental object, at least in myhands, some interesting conclusions weredrawn. First, unlike most conventional cropsof the temperate zone, Cinchona elevates waterand mineral nutrients from soil to foliage bya substantial hydrostatic pressure generatedin the root system. By hindsight, this wouldseem a most natural mechanism for plantsadapted to essentially water-saturated atmo-spheres. Second, this hydrostatic pressureappeared to be dependent on a continuingsupply of soil-borne magnesium and or-

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