Much of the history of movement of tree commodity crop germplasm is fairly well documented, since transfers were frequently undertaken for commercial reasons by the European powers during their period of colonial expansion (see Mohan Jain and Priyadarshan, 2009 for information on early germplasm movements for a range of tree commodities). The natural rubber industry in Southeast Asia, for example, was first based on seedlings transferred from Brazilian Amazonia via Kew Botanic Gardens in the United Kingdom to Sri Lanka and Singapore in the 1870s (Gonçalves and Fontes, 2012)