Cinchona in the year 1851. Mr. [Thaddäus] Haenke mentioned the existence of cinchona bark on his visit to Yuracares in 1796". (Source: Exploration of the Valley of the Amazon, by Lieut. Lardner Gibbon, USN. Vol.II, Ch.6, pp. 146-47.) The cultivation of cinchona led from the 1890s to a decline in the price of quinine but the quality and production of raw bark by the Dutch in Indonesia led them to dominate world markets. The producers of processed drugs in Europe (especially Germany) however bargained and caused fluctuations in prices which led to a Dutch-led Cinchona Agreement in 1913 that ensured a
Bark (botany) the ground to where the main branching starts) of the tree. Bark tissues make up by weight between 10–20% of woody vascular plants and consists of various biopolymers, tannins, lignin, suberin, suberan and polysaccharides. Up to 40% of the bark tissue is made of lignin which forms an important part of a plant providing structural support by crosslinking between different polysaccharides, such as cellulose. Condensed tannin, which are in fairly high concentration in bark tissue, is thought to inhibit decomposition. It could be due to this factor that the degradation of lignin is far less pronounced in bark tissue than