--Concentrating some 60% of the national sugarcane production, São Paulo state doesn’t share the riches from the ethanol boom with its 135,000 cutters, who often live in precarious conditions

Mário Magalhães and Joel Silva

(translated from Brazilian Portuguese)

Sharply at 4:42, sugarcane worker Ilma Francisca de Souza leaves for work with her lunch box containing rice covered with sliced sausage. In Serrana, another neighborhood, even before the sun rises, Rosimira Lopes leaves for the sugarcane fields carrying rice with only one side dish: beans.

During the day, they will make use of the food, which will already be cold. Despite the noteworthy progress arising from ethanol plants with astounding technology, Brazil still does not serve hot meals to sugarcane workers.

The lunch box remains cold.

For two months, Folha investigated living and working conditions for sugarcane cutters in the state that has 60% of production in the nation which is the biggest producer on the planet.

People like Ilma and Rosimira.

In one of the steps for gathering this story, during 15 days we traveled 3,810 kilometers by car, the equivalent of nine trips between São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. A map (see page 6) shows the location of the towns we visited.

For the first time in five centuries, since the samples of the crop were brought by Portuguese pioneers, in 2008 at least half of the sugarcane in São Paulo will not be collected by hand, but by machine. This is what the mills announced.

Just as it was at the turn between the 16^th and the 17^th centuries, when the country was the world leader in sugar production, sugarcane now offers immense opportunities to Brazil with the ethanol, for which cane is the prime material. Ethanol can be transformed into a commodity, with prices in international markets. The mills generate electrical energy.

The wealth of the ethanol industry, which must yield R$ 40 billion (R$ 25 billion) this year, didn’t reach the workers. In 1985, a sugarcane cutter in São Paulo earned R$ 32.70 per day on average (at current values). In 2007, they earned R$ 28.90. Their incomes fell, but the toughness of the work increased. In 1985, workers used to cut 5 tons of cane per day. In the current harvest, the average is 9.3 tons.

In 19 towns in the countryside of São Paulo State – at the capital, we spoke to an industry representative – the reporters sought to understand why, among nine agricultural products, sugarcane attracts the youngest workers.

It demands a great deal of physical effort: it is necessary to swing a machete 3,792 times and bend the back 3,994 times to collect 11.5 tons per day. In recent years, deaths of sugarcane workers have been associated with excessive work.

There is a case of an itinerant laborer who died weeks after collecting 16.5 tons. There is no parallel in any region to such huge profits.

On the highway, we saw rickety buses; in the fields, lacking safety equipment. We saw dwellings with no hygiene, workers who earned less than the minimum wage, communities of sugarcane cutters who depend on government food subsidies, migrants who try their luck and workers who want to get rid of the addiction to crack and other drugs.

Documents prove the existence of fraud in weighing sugarcane, hurting workers.

At the peak and decadence of the sugarcane cycle (16^th-18^th centuries), slaves worked the fields and put the mills to work. The startup of Brazil’s ethanol industry was set upon mostly by black workers.

As slaves were left out of the works of some historians, sugarcane cutters are a invisible species in the trade journals of the sugarcane industry. They show high-tech mills, but manual laborers in the countryside are hidden.

The similarity of the symbols of work today with those of pre-abolition is very impressive, when one’s traveling the world and underworld of sugarcane. An inspector in the mills is called a foreman (“feitor” in Portuguese).

Complaints about slave workers accumulate. It is a mistake to assume that accusations of degradation are far from the richest state in Brazil and limited to the “Deep Brazil”, the most remote areas.

One of them is narrated here. In São Paulo, they are found in Riberão Preto, a center of the sugarcane industry considered our “California.”

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has been understating the reports about work in sugarcane farms. Last year, he said mill owners “are becoming national and world heroes because everyone has an eye in ethanol”.

The fear of retaliations is huge among sugarcane workers. No name was changed in these stories, but some people, by request, are identified only by their first names or not even that. The interviews were recorder, under consent.

Those anti-heroes are many: according to mill owners, there are 335,000 sugarcane cutters in Brazil, including the 335 thousand in São Paulo. On the state, the industry intends to abolish hand cutting by 2015, alongside with the burnings which make harvest easier.

Ilma and Rosimira are an endangered species. For half a millennium, the cutters – enslaved or hired – have lived through tough times. In the next years, it will not be different: with low qualification, they’ll have to look for other ways of survival.

All the unions see a drop in recruiting.

The sugarcane fields are not as distant as it seems: when one fills his tank with 49 liters of ethanol, he consumes one ton of cane; when he sweetens with sugar his coffee for breakfast, thousands of Brazilians are in the fields with their machetes in hand.

With production on the rise and falling wages, excessive work surrounds plantations

If money goes to money, as they say, then poverty goes to poverty – and tragedy forebids tragedy. Sought in Guariba to talk about her husband, who died after feeling ill in the sugarcane fields in 2005, Maildes de Araujo gets to talk about someone who died two weeks earlier: her brother-in-law, also a cane cutter.

José Pindobeira Santos was 65. He reaped cane until last year. "He complained of pains in the belly, of colic”, says his daughter Ivanir, a maid. He returned from the fields with pain in the groin. He never looked for treatment, and was not treated.

Pindobeira died of intestinal obstruction and bronchial aspiration. No one knows how far the toil in the farm affected his health. In the 1960s, he was already cutting cane on the outskirts of Guariba.

Maildes’ husband Antonio Lopes Ribeiro came into this world in July of 1950, three days before the supreme shame of this country’s soccer, the final of the World Cup in Rio. He migrated from Berilo (MG), a city in the extremely poor region of Vale do Jequitinhonha.

In the reporter accidents – and underreporting is considerably high –, the cleaver tore her leg and knee. Pains in right shoulder took him away from the ranch. He suffered with a headache. His efforts at work triggered cramps in his stomach, legs and arms. Suffering of Chagas disease, but he didn’t get a leave.

He worked at the Moreno mill. He collapsed on the field and was taken to the hospital. Cause of death: "chagasic uncompensated cardiopathy."

Lopes is part of a list with the names two dozen canavieiros who died in the countryside of São Paulo from 2004 to 2007 – the youngest among them aged 20. The list was prepared by the Pastoral Care for Migrants and Refugees. There are more deaths, but they haven’t been reported as deaths by exhaustion.

This list doesn’t include labor accidents – in 2005, out of each thousand workers in the cultivation of sugar cane, 48 suffered occupational accidents, according to University of São Paulo researchers Marcia Azanha Ferraz Dias de Moraes and Andrea R. Ferro.

That year, according to the Labor Ministry, 84 people died in accidents in the sugar and ethanol industry, which includes farms and industrial plants (which accounts for 3.1% of all deaths from labor accidents in Brazil). Labor prosecutors investigate the causes of death and their association with the tough nature of manual cutting.

A 2006 report by the Secretary for Inspection at the Labor Ministry lists dozens of irregularities in companies which had hired those farmers who died.

One of them is the non-compliance with an hour break for lunch. The cutters eat in 10 or 20 minutes, so they can once again wield the machete. They are paid by production. No files say the work was decisive for the deaths. It would be difficult to state that: out of the eight cases inspected by the ministry, only two had autopsies.

The report by the Secretary of Inspection says: “Sudden malaise, cardiorespiratory arrest and stroke, described in certificates as causes of death, are not sufficient to justify natural death, as the companies claim”.

There are indications about why the canavieiros die.

In 1985, São Paulo cutters reaped a daily average of 5 tons of cane. In 2008, the average is 9.3 tons – or 86% more. 23 years ago, a farmer received R$ 6.55 per tonne and R$ 32.70 per day. In 2007, cutting 1,000 kg of cane pays them R$ 3.29. Daily, they get R$ 28.90 (12% less).

Productivity went high up and the wages fell. With the mechanization of cutting and accelerated expansion of unemployment, only the most efficient stay. The man competes with the combine.

Figures for 1985 and 2007 come from the Institute for Agricultural Economics. Upgraded to August 2007 prices, they are mentioned in an article by researchers Rodolfo Hoffmann (UNICAMP) and Fabíola C. R. de Oliveira (USP).

Working since he was 13, former cane-cutting champion has, at 35, a hernia and his spine feels “locked”

 Valdecir da Silva Reis, the skinny man who consumes his days lying in bed to watch TV, was once a champion. No one had a chance near him. In the fields, he beat record upon record. 

On March 20, 2006, he cut 21 tonnes. On May 17, another 28. Eight days later, he tore 560 meters of plantation, cutting five lines of cane to be paid for only one line – that’s the law. Strictly speaking, he brought down 2.8 km of cane. 

The salary stub printed by his employer, Meia Lua, shows that day’s record: 52.47 tons. That was nearly one tonne for each kilo of his body, since he weighed 56 kg. Today, he says he weighs 49 kg. It seems to be less than that. 

The cutter who caused sighs of disbelief in his colleagues is now languishing in a house in Engenheiro Coelho city, where he lives with relatives. 

In the fields, he felt no pain. In 2006, though, his backbone "hung" and he did not return to the sugarcane field. At 35, he dreams of a day when he will return to the job where he became the hero of friends. 

As great as his will may be, he suspects he will not wield the machete again. The diagnosis shows problems in the lumbar spine, esophageal hernia and imbalances in the urinal signs. 

Valdecir complains of pain in his head, stomach, chest (he didn’t check his heart), scrotum, the right shoulder, arms, knees and legs; he complains of lacking of strength to lift a bottle of water; of feeling tired after walking 800 meters; of hearing badly in one ear. 

The left side of his chest is more developed, with his left arm, he used to throw the cane at the “leira”, the hall opened in the land where sugar cane is harvested.

Even if the human rag who speaks low and puffing about his misfortune was the creation of a masterly and ultra-realistic stanislavskian actor, not even then it would be possible to make up a story with beginning, middle and end as his story – the reporters dug into the case with basis in plenty of documents and testimonies. 

Valdecir began to cut cane at 13. His employers awarded his prowess with gifts like a bicycle and a stereo system. 

After "locking" in 2006, he received aid from Social Security. Last May 5, though, a medical evaluation considered him fit for the job and the aid was cancelled. His income now is zero. 

He lives with a daughter from his previous marriage and his wife, Helen. A maid, she earns R$ 30 per cleaning. She cleans two houses per week. 

The job for which the INSS [the Brazilian social security system] does not see "serious problem" for Valdecir to exercise "is not comparable to that of a clerk," says a mill executive. Clerical positions are announced with a workload of 30 to 40 hours a week. In a similar time frame, a cane cutter in São Paulo state works, officially, 44 hours in six days. 

Clerks and cutters have to work for 35 years to be able to retire. Most of the cutters, though, work only during the harvest: eight active months a year. They never count 12 months of contribution in a row.

The performance of some of them is so exuberant that the famous Cuban champions of cane-cutting campaigns would be considered second-rate players. In 1965, Fidel Castro awarded five of them, who cut from 14 to 19.7 tonnes in one day. At the Meia Lua mill, which formerly employed Valdecir, a cutter hit 35 tonnes on June 20. The reporters tried to talk to the company, but did not find their address and telephone number. 

The champions, as the holders of the best performances are called in the field, tend to be lean and strong. Valdecir is 1.65 m tall. 

Samuel Gomes, 38, is one of the champions in Guariba. He’s 1.85 m tall. Barack Obama is 1.86 m. The U.S. senator weighs something between 77 kg and 82 kg. Samuel, with his 68 kg, tells he has cut to 27 tonnes in a day, this year, in a plant in São Carlos. 

With so much physical demand, there are nine men (92%) per woman in Brazil's sugarcane fields. In nine relevant agricultures, the workers with lower average age are those of cane: 35.5 years, according to data compiled by researchers Rodolfo Hoffmann (UNICAMP) and Fabíola C.R. Oliveira (USP).

The company’s buses pick the cutters at home between 5 AM and 6 AM. In the field, the journey begins at 7am. Many have their "lunch" before starting the harvest. There are entitled to ten-minute intervals in the morning and evening. By 10 or 11 AM, there’s one hour for lunch – but few of the workers use all that time. The journey ends at 3 or 4 PM, but there are excesses. Workers arrive to their homes between 5 and 7 PM. They sleep by 8 or 9, to wake up between 3:30 and 4:30 AM.

An ongoing ergonomic analysis research, funded by the Fapesp (São Paulo state support to research foundation) and coordinated by researchers Rodolfo Vilela and Erivelton de Laat, describes the movements of cutters. 

One of these workers, who reaped 11.5 tons, gave 3,792 machete blows in one day and bent his backbone 3,994 times. The machete weighs 600 grams. They strike the cane at the bottom, where the saccharose concentrates. A right-hander cutter hugs the beam of about ten canes with his left arm (or, stick by stick, with his hand), then he curves up and strikes with the right arm. With the left arm, he throws the cane in the “leira”, from where a machine will pick it later. 

In one group, the average heart rate at rest was 57.4 beats per minute. At work, the rate was 112 per minute – an excessive variation, say the researchers (the difference should be limited to 35). 

The activity of the cutters is compared to that of marathoners, with tiresome repetition of moves. Maria Zeferina Bandaia, champion at the Sao Paulo Marathon in 2008, was once a cane cutter in the countryside. "One thing has a lot to do with the other," she confirms. 

Unions of employees call for the reduction of weekly workload to 40 hours, with two days of rest. Cristina Gonzaga, a researcher at Fundacentro, a research foundation at the Ministry of Labor, advocates 30 hours, with five days of six hours per week. 

The companies reject the claims. 

That is the life Valdecir fancies to live again. He hides at home. "People see us on the street and say we’re bums. They don’t see what we have inside, what we feel.