but the rubber trees inland gave owners incentives to penetrate further. A major industry developed that linked wild trees, to exploited labor, to owners of tracts of land, to local commercial agents, to Brazilian companies dealing in trade with foreign companies, to international shipping companies. Brazil was eventually displaced as the world's major source of rubber following the 1876 theft by a Briton, Henry Wickham, who smuggled 70,000 Amazonian rubber tree seeds from Brazil and delivered them to the royal botanical gardens at Kew, England. Some 2,500 germinated and were then sent to British colonies in India, British Ceylon (Sri Lanka), and British Malaya, among others, where extensive plantations were established. Malaya (now Peninsular Malaysia) was later to become the biggest producer of rubber. Brazil's rubber boom came to an end, but the conservation of the forests that kept the industry viable meant that Brazil's Amazonian rain forest kept its original density until deforestation was initiated in the 1970s. Bananas Bananas are a tropical plant that has become a major export crop from tropical regions of Central and South America at the end of the nineteenth century. Bananas are relatively easy to grow in the tropics where there is sufficient water, but it could not become a major export crop until it could be brought to market quickly and sold cheaply to consumers. It first developed as an industry at the end of the nineteenth century in Costa Rica by American entrepreneur Minor Cooper Keith. Keith was contracted by the Costa Rican government to build a railway to the Gulf Coast port of Costa Rica so that the country's main export crop at the time, coffee, could more quickly reach Europe, its main market. The east coast of Costa Rica was thickly forested, so that building a railway was not easy. Keith received land along the railway in partial compensation, which when cleared he turned into extensive banana cultivation of the Gros Michel (“Big Mike”) (Musa acuminate) variety in monoculture. The railway transported green bananas to the coast, which were loaded onto refrigerated ships he owned, and upon the bananas’ offloading in New Orleans, the railway network used refrigerated railway cars to distribute the bananas to local grocery stores. Disaster struck the industry with the outbreak of Panama disease, a fungus affecting banana plants that was resistant to fungicides. Banana plantations were abandoned in areas affected by the fungus, and