{"id":16904,"date":"2024-03-13T13:48:09","date_gmt":"2024-03-13T13:48:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/2024\/03\/13\/children-in-brazil-are-climbing-70-foot-high-trees-so-you-can-eat-acai-berries\/"},"modified":"2024-03-13T13:48:09","modified_gmt":"2024-03-13T13:48:09","slug":"children-in-brazil-are-climbing-70-foot-high-trees-so-you-can-eat-acai-berries","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/2024\/03\/13\/children-in-brazil-are-climbing-70-foot-high-trees-so-you-can-eat-acai-berries\/","title":{"rendered":"Children in Brazil are climbing 70-foot-high trees so you can eat a\u00e7a\u00ed berries"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

At the port of Igarap\u00e9 da Fortaleza, in the far north of Brazil, dock workers unload large orange-red sacks from small wooden boats. Small dark berries scatter around the dock, staining everything purple and making the pavement slippery. After being washed, processed, and blended, each sack will make about five gallons of a\u00e7a\u00ed pulp that will go into bowls, smoothies, and freeze-dried supplements. <\/p>\n

In Spring, when most fruit is not yet ripe, each 130-pound sack is being sold to wholesalers for about $80, more than double the price it sells for when it is in season. Buyers may or may not know that the superfood they are purchasing to sell to multinationals may have been picked by children \u2014 no one is checking. <\/p>\n

Eighty dollars would be a fortune for harvesters to take home, but they still need to pay the \u201ccrossers,\u201d who provide boat transportation from nearby villages to the jungle and back, and the landowners whose trees they harvested. It has not always been this way. Growing demand has transformed what was once a mostly local industry into an international operation that puts pressure on communities that have, for decades, depended on the fruit for economic survival and their own subsistence. <\/p>\n

In <\/strong>2012, the state of Par\u00e1, which produces more than 90% of Brazil\u2019s a\u00e7a\u00ed, exported 39 tons of the fruit; in 2022, 8,158 tons were exported generating over $26 million in revenue, <\/strong>according to industry data. As a result, children are being sent on dangerous journeys to harvest the fruit, climbing trees as tall as 70 feet without harnesses, and exposing themselves to the perils of the swamps of the rainforest, including venomous snakes, scorpions, and jaguars. <\/p>\n

Picking berries to help feed his family<\/h2>\n

Lucas walked through the jungle using a machete as big as his arm to slice large leaves and branches. As he cleared the path, he looked up as much as he looked ahead, scanning each palm tree in the canopy. \u201cHere, this one\u2019s got some,\u201d Lucas said, dropping his tarp bag. <\/p>\n

He tucked his machete into the waist of his shorts, and with a single jump wrapped his skinny legs around the trunk of a palm tree. He pulled himself up, scaling 20 feet up the palm before disappearing into the canopy. After some rustling, Lucas yelled, \u201cIt\u2019s ripe!\u201d The rustling increased, and leaves, sticks and tiny, rock-hard purple-black berries began to fall. Wengleston was pleased. \u201cYou got two!\u201d Lucas slid down with two bunches of a\u00e7a\u00ed, weighing about 10 pounds each. Lucas will do this dozens of times on a single day. <\/p>\n

Wengleston, now 20 years old, dropped out of school when he was Lucas\u2019 age to work full time. In these seven years, he\u2019s developed serious back pain from carrying up to 200 pounds of a\u00e7a\u00ed on his back daily. \u201cOne day I was lifting a sack and I felt that my back just ripped open,\u201d Wengleston said. \u201cSome days I can\u2019t work because of all the pain, so I have to stay home.\u201d He said he is afraid of losing more mobility soon, or ending up like other a\u00e7a\u00ed harvesters who have developed back issues so severe they can no longer walk. <\/p>\n

Policing hard-to-reach locations<\/h2>\n

Across the country, 1.9 million children between the ages of 5 and 17 were engaged in child labor in 2022, according to a December report from Brazil\u2019s statistics bureau. Of those, at least 756,000 worked in what the International Labor Organization calls the worst forms of child labor, which includes \u201cdangerous\u201d conditions. <\/p>\n

One of the biggest challenges when it comes to tackling this problem is that regions where child labor is most pervasive are the hardest ones to police, authorities say. \u201cThat\u2019s why they\u2019re called hard-to-reach locations, where you can only reach and get there with a lot of effort and overcoming all these obstacles,\u201d said Allan Bruno, a prosecutor with Brazil\u2019s Public Ministry of Labor. <\/p>\n

Bruno said they have a special focus on the Maraj\u00f3 archipelago and the coastline of Amap\u00e1, where rural work is characterized mostly by buffalo breeding and a\u00e7a\u00ed harvesting, and they investigate the use and recruitment of children for this type of work. <\/p>\n

Bruno is part of a special joint task force of prosecutors, investigators, and federal police that investigates situations akin to slavery and raids properties to rescue workers and children. <\/p>\n

Usually, Bruno said, the people being rescued are not aware that their rights are being infringed upon. \u201cThese are people who are inserted at the bottom of society, who did not have the right to education, did not have the right to health, and did not have the right to basic rights that could enable them to develop minimum employability. So, these are pockets of poverty that are the focus of recruitment by recruiters who seek cheap labor to exploit,\u201d Bruno said. <\/p>\n

He adds that the system is too slow, understaffed, and lacking the resources to inspect such a big swath of the country \u2014 and one that only now is starting to fix itself after years of not being a priority for the federal government: There are currently 900 openings waiting to be filled for labor inspectors.<\/strong> <\/p>\n

For now, Lucas will continue to scale these towering trees, but authorities\u2019 focus on his region offers hope for a future where children aren\u2019t forced to risk their lives in dangerous labor to feed themselves and their families <\/p>\n\n

This post appeared first on cnn.com<\/div>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At the port of Igarap\u00e9 da Fortaleza, in the far north of Brazil, dock workers unload large orange-red sacks from small wooden boats. Small dark berries scatter around the dock, staining everything purple and making the pavement slippery. After being washed, processed, and blended, each sack will make about five gallons of a\u00e7a\u00ed pulp that <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":16905,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-16904","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16904","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16904"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16904\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16905"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16904"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16904"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16904"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}