The Internationalist Archive
Maria Luisa Mendonça is director of Rede Social de Justiça e Direitos Humanos (Network for Social Justice and Human Rights) and a research scholar at the Center for Place, Culture and Politics, CUNY Graduate Center. Her publications cover the history and political economy of agriculture, food, land and water systems, as well as geopolitical processes of resistance by rural social movements.
For issue #53 of The Internationalist, we draw from Mendonça’s extraordinary book, The Political Economy of Agribusiness: A Critical Development Perspective (2023, Fernwood Publishing). In this excerpt, she delves into how the mechanization of sugarcane plantations in Brazil, driven by a productivity-based payment system, has led to increased exploitation, rising unemployment, and widespread labor rights violations.
Labour exploitation is a part of a structural system on sugarcane plantations in Brazil in which the payment of workers is based on productivity, not hourly work. Payment based on the amount of sugarcane a worker has cut is determined by the mill’s scales, and workers have no way to monitor them. In the last few decades, most sugarcane corporations increased mechanization as a way to replace workers and improve their image in relation to labour rights violations, especially to reach international markets. During the 1970s and 1980s, sugarcane producers increased the mechanization of planting and crop treatment (Silva 2002), but the mechanization of the harvest process only became more common in the twenty-first century.
Further industrialization of agriculture has led to growing unemployment in the sugarcane sector. The national rate of mechanization in sugarcane harvesting rose from 18 percent in 1989 to 80 percent in 2014. By that time, 75 percent of sugarcane harvesting had been mechanized in the state of São Paulo, which is the country’s largest producer. In the states of Mato Grosso do Sul and Goiás, where plantations expanded during that period, mechanization reached 50 percent (Pitta 2016). Machinery replaced workers by the thousands, causing the number of jobs to drop significantly. In the state of São Paulo, the number of rural workers in 1986 was estimated at 440,000. In 2014, this number had decreased to approximately 94,000 (Baccarin 2014).
Replacing sugarcane cutters with machines increased exploitation and competition among workers who had to meet larger production quotas to keep their jobs. Sugarcane corporations also used mechanization as a strategy to blackmail workers who demanded higher wages and better labour conditions. To avoid responsibility for labour rights, sugarcane corporations contracted temporary workers via intermediary schemes. This system of exploitation included the illegal transportation of migrant workers from different regions of Brazil to the plantations, where they faced contemporary slavery conditions. As they were forced to repay debts incurred for the costs of equipment, housing and food, they received almost no payment for their labour.
Mechanization of sugarcane plantations escalated exploitation, since the quota for sugarcane cutters increased from four tonnes of sugarcane per day in 1980 to approximately ten tonnes in 2006. In the state of São Paulo, workers received about US$1.20 per tonne of sugarcane cut and packed. To receive $220 per month, workers would have to cut an average of ten tonnes of sugarcane per day. Meeting this goal would require swinging their scythe thirty times per minute over eight hours of work per day. New technology used in genetically modified sugarcane makes it lighter and increases labour exploitation: one hundred square metres of regular sugarcane weighs ten tonnes, whereas three hundred square metres of genetically modified sugarcane are needed to reach the same weight (Ramos 2007).
Machine operators in sugarcane plantations also face exploitation, typically working twelve hours a day. In 2012, the Public Prosecutor’s Office reported a case where the labour rights of machine operators were violated at a plantation controlled by Raízen. According to the inspectors’ report,
“Raízen committed fraud with the clear goal of reducing the costs of the production process. At least ten workers hired by the Marca de Ibaté outsourcing firm had an employment relationship with Raízen. Their contract was terminated with the corporation, which was Cosan at that time, on July 28, 2011, and they were rehired by the outsourcing firm the following day, on July 29, 2011, to carry out the same tasks. This mechanism increases precariousness, as workers’ salaries with the outsourcing firm corresponded on average to 63 percent of the salary paid by Raízen.… Workers do not have access to washrooms, a place to have meals, shelter, drinking water and first aid supplies, which are essential in case of accidents. The inspection identified excessively long working days and no breaks.” ( Jornal de Araraquara 2012)
In 2011, the Ministry of Labour reported a case of slave labour at a mechanized sugarcane plantation:
“Workers who were subjected to a regime analogous to slavery in the mechanized harvesting process have been liberated. In total, thirty-nine workers were rescued. They operated sugarcanecutting machines on an estate in the city of Goiatuba, Goiás. Their work schedule alternated twenty-four-hour workdays (twenty-seven when one includes the three hours of travel to and from plantations) with a break of twenty-one consecutive hours. At least two accidents caused by fatigue at the wheel were registered. The accidents involved two drivers that had been operating machines for more than twenty hours straight.” (RádioAgência NP 2011)
These cases demonstrate that slave labour and degrading working conditions continued in sugarcane plantations after mechanization. In some cases, labour conditions got worse because of the demand on workers to increase productivity to keep their jobs.
The pressure to increase productivity caused the deaths of dozens of sugarcane workers due to exhaustion in the fields during the 2000s, in addition to many reported cases of illnesses and mutilations. Labour exploitation got worse when the demand for ethanol increased on international markets. Between 2004 and 2007, the Ministry of Labour recorded twenty-one deaths of workers in the fields due to exhaustion and generalized cramps throughout their bodies from cutting sugarcane. For that same time, the Ministry of Labour documented an additional 450 deaths of sugarcane workers by other causes, including assassinations, accidents during the precarious transport to the plantations, illnesses such as cardiac arrest and cancer and severe burns from fires in the field. In 2007, the Ministry of Labour recorded three workers’ deaths in the sugarcane fields in the state of São Paulo. José Pereira Martins, fifty-two years old, died from a heart attack after cutting sugarcane in the city of Guariba. Twenty-year-old Lourenço Paulino de Souza was found dead at the São José plantation, in Barretos. Adriano de Amaral, thirty-one, died when the water ran out from the hose that he was using to control a fire. Another worker in that incident, forty-four-year-old Ivanildo Gomes, had burns on 44 percent of his body. (Mendonça 2012)
During the period of increasing mechanization in sugarcane plantations, between 2003 and 2010, the Pastoral Land Commission documented more than ten thousand cases of workers rescued from slavery conditions. They were not registered workers and were living in precarious shelters. They had no protective equipment, an inadequate water and food supply and no access to bathrooms. Workers had to pay for their equipment, such as boots and machetes, and in cases of accidents, they did not receive medical treatment. From 2003 to 2006, sugarcane corporations were responsible for 10 percent of total cases of slave labour in Brazil, or 1,605 cases. This percentage increased in the following years to 51 percent in 2007, or 3,060 cases; 48 percent in 2008, or 2,553 cases; 45 percent in 2009, or 1,911 cases; and 18 percent in 2010, or 535 cases.
In 2006, the Attorney General’s Office cited seventy-four plantations in the state of São Paulo, and all of them were charged. In March 2007, the Ministry of Labour rescued 288 workers in slave-like conditions at six plantations in the state of São Paulo. In another operation carried out in March of that year, a group from the Regional Labour Precinct (Delegacia Regional do Trabalho) of Mato Grosso do Sul rescued 409 workers, including 150 Indigenous people, in sugarcane fields. In June 2007, the Ministry of Labour freed 1,108 workers in slavery conditions in sugarcane plantations in the state of Pará in the Amazon region. The workers received less than R$10 (about US$5, according to the exchange rate at that time) per month, and the illegal deductions from workers’ wages by the company consumed almost the entire amount. The inspectors reported that the food supplied to the workers was rotten, and they suffered from nausea and diarrhea. Their drinking water was filthy, and it was the same water used for irrigation in the fields. The workers’ shelter was very crowded and had an open sewer inside. The majority of workers were migrants from the states of Maranhão and Piauí, but the company did not provide transportation for them to return home (Mendonça 2012).
These types of labour violations were found on farms operated by large corporations such as Cosan. In June 2007, an inspection by the Ministry of Labour found forty-two workers who were facing conditions comparable to slavery in a Cosan mill in the state of São Paulo. In 2008, other inspections found several violations of labour laws in eighteen Cosan plants. The public prosecutor described some of these violations as “lack of drinking water and toilets at the workplace, lack of protective equipment and lack of appropriate eating conditions.” In March 2010, an inspection by the Ministry of Labour found violations of labour laws at another Cosan plant called Gaza, where 350 workers described a lack of protective equipment, adequate tools, sanitary facilities, drinking water and access to basic medical care and first aid. They also reported dangerous working conditions, including with the transportation used, which was associated with long working hours to increase productivity. As a result, Cosan had to sign two legal agreements with the Public Prosecutor’s Office and pay fines of R$2.5 million and R$900,000 for violating labour laws (Mendonça, Pitta and Xavier 2014).
Most sugarcane cutters are men, but companies also hire women for manual cutting and planting. Their payment is based on productivity, and when planting they have to cover a very large area, averaging 750 square metres, per day to receive R$9 (US$5) in wages. Women farmworkers described how exploitation is a historical characteristic in sugarcane plantations in Brazil.
“I started working when I was eleven years old to help my mother in the fields when she was pregnant. My mother got very sick and died when she was fifty-nine. I’m forty-two now and I think the same will happen to me,” said Maria Souza from the state of Pernambuco. In the state of São Paulo, Lusiane dos Santos described a similar situation: “I’m thirty-eight years old and I started cutting sugarcane when I was twenty. I had to stop going to school because my father left us and my mother sent me to work.”
Carlita da Costa, president of the Cosmópolis Rural Workers Union in the state of São Paulo, has been organizing farmworkers, especially women, in a sector dominated by men. She started cutting sugarcane at a young age to support her three children, and she knows that workers need to demand structural changes to overcome poverty and oppression:
“It’s common to hear people’s coughs and screams in the cane fields. We have to inhale pesticides and the ash from burned cane. Once I fell and felt the taste of blood in my mouth. I broke my arm and could not work anymore. I have lung problems and feel sick from that horrible work. I realized that cane cutting was killing me.”
Agribusiness’s monopoly over land restricts peasants’ livelihood options and, as a result, they become more vulnerable to labour exploitation. Many men from rural areas migrate to different regions in the country, looking for seasonal jobs at plantations or construction, and some never return to their families. For women, it is more difficult to find an alternative, and so they usually stay home, taking on the responsibility of caring for their children and elderly parents. But some women also migrate in search of jobs, as in the case of Ana Célia:
“I’m twenty-four and I came from Pernambuco to work in São Paulo. The company only pays for fifty kilos of sugarcane a day, even when we cut sixty kilos. My whole body hurts. I need to leave this job because I’m getting sick. The cost of rent, water and electricity is very high, and after paying for everything, there is nothing left from my salary.”
Edite Rodrigues told a similar story:
“I’m thirty-one and I came from the state of Minas Gerais to work in São Paulo. I have three kids and need to support them, but I can’t wait to leave this job. At the end of the day, my body is broken, and I feel like throwing up. But the next day, we have to start all over again. The pollution from burning sugarcane is horrible for my lungs, not to mention the effects of pesticides. There is no fixed wage. It depends on how much sugarcane we cut. For women, it’s much worse than for men because they give us the worst jobs for less pay. We depend on meal vouchers, or we go hungry.”
Odete Mendes, who works at a plantation in São Paulo, said that her salary only covered rent for a very small room and was not enough for other expenses: “I cannot stay in this job. It’s very hard. Once I broke my arm. I constantly feel a lot of pain in my hands, my lungs suffocate and sometimes I think I will die in the fields.”
Women farmworkers advocate for regular working hours, equal pay, maternity leave, health care, childcare and social benefits. They face a dual situation of oppression because they are responsible for household labour and for providing for their families. Ivanusa Ribeiro, a worker in the state of Pernambuco, explained: “I wake up at two in the morning to start working at 4 a.m., and I only stop at 3 p.m. After getting home, I still have a lot of work to do, cleaning the house, cooking for my kids and my husband.” She said this situation will only change if the government gives more incentives for agrarian reform and for small farmers to produce food. She also said she sees the need for an education system that is meaningful to women in the countryside.
Notes:
Baccarin, José Giacomo. 2014. Ocupação formal no setor sucroalcooleiro em São Paulo. Jaboticabal: UNESP.
Jornal de Araraquara. 2012. “Raízen (antiga Cosan) é Processada pelo MPT.” April 21.
Mendonça, Maria Luisa. 2012. Monopólio da terra no Brasil: Impactos da expansão de monocultivos para a produção de agrocombustíveis. São Paulo: Rede Social de Justiça e Direitos Humanos e Comissão Pastoral da Terra. <social.org.br/pub/revistasportugues/80-revista-monopolio-da-terra-no-brasil2>.
Mendonça, Maria Luisa, Fábio T. Pitta, and Carlos V. Xavier. 2014. Transnational
Corporations and Agrofuels Production in Brazil. São Paulo: Editora Outras
Expressões.
Pitta, Fábio T. 2016. “As transformações na reprodução fictícia do capital na
agroindústria canavieira paulista: do Proálcool à crise de 2008.” Doctoral
dissertation, University of São Paulo. <teses.usp.br/teses/disponiveis/8/8136/
tde-10052016-140701/publico/2016_FabioTeixeiraPitta_VCorr.pdf>.
RádioAgencia NP. 2011. “Primeiro resgate de trabalhadores escravizados em colheita
mecanizada ocorre no país.” December 22.
Ramos, Pedro. 2007. “O uso de mão-de-obra na lavoura canavieira: Da legislação (agrária) do Estado Novo ao trabalho super-explorado na atualidade.” In Anais II Seminário de História do Açúcar: Trabalho População e Cotidiano. São Paulo: Editora do Museu Paulista da USP.
Silva, Maria Aparecida de Moraes. 2002. Errantes do fim do século. São Paulo, Editora UNESP.
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