Which Western countries, other than France,relied on Vietnam’s natural resources (rubber, metals, coal? etc) before the Vietnam War (1963-1975). I had read that some Eastern European countries also relied on Vietnam’s natural resources. But I haven’t found any references to which ones.
well, I know that my father was very pleased with his Vietnamese bamboo fly rod back in the sixties. The bamboo came, many years earlier, from what was then North Vietnam and apparently considered the best possible material for fly rods.
Vietnam was in the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, which was a trade area of communist countries the USSR set up during the cold war. All of the Warsaw Pact countries were in the Comecon.
And indirectly, those countries to whom France traded. Rubber has relatively few sources: this article has data from 2008 and information on the history of rubber cultivation in the countries listed. A lot of what we’d call “rubber” now is not; it’s synthetic polymers, with natural rubber often called “latex” (eg., in latex gloves and latex-free gloves). Artificial rubber is a product of WWII.