Small children are climbing 60-foot trees to harvest your acai

CURRALINHO, Brazil — The sun had barely risen, but José Armando Matos de Lima, 11, was already on the job. As his sisters slept in their hammocks, the boy fired up the family’s longboat, headed upstream and collected the order of the day: 15 buckets — more than 450 pounds — of açaí.

He was dreading the task ahead. The day was shaping up to be another scorcher. The jungle was full of scorpions, one of which had bit his hand months before. A girl across the river had been hospitalized after a recent fall while harvesting the fruit. But he was the best climber his family had. Açaí was their primary source of income. And this was his life: Toiling on the bottom rung of an industry that connects some of Brazil’s poorest people to America’s health-absorbed elite.

“Let’s go,” José said.

A brooding child with a shy smile, he tucked a serrated blade into his ripped shorts and headed out to perform what researchers and labor officials describe as one of the most dangerous jobs in Brazil, the world’s principal producer of açaí. At harvest time, tens of thousands of Brazilians, equipped with nothing more than knives and swatches of burlap to protect their bare feet, climb the wild açaí palm trees every day, ascending without harnesses to heights that can top 65 feet.

Because the tree’s trunk is tall and thin, and because the weight of an adult can snap it, often those who make the climb are children. It’s unknown how many assume the deadly risk; the government has never counted. But researchers agree the practice is widespread among the estimated 120,000 families who work the harvest.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/11/28/brazil-acai-child-labor/