Sugar harvest advances have social cost in Brazil

By Inae Riveras
Reuters
Sunday, October 19, 2008; 8:09 PM
PRINCESA ISABEL, Brazil (Reuters) - Ines Ferreira dos Santos lives with four of her kids in a spacious, colorful house at the end of a dusty street.
"With money from sugar cane we built this house. It has been good to us, too good," the 43-year-old housewife said.
This is the eleventh year that her husband, Joao Barbosa dos Santos, has traveled the 3,000 kilometers (1,864 miles) to work as a sugar cane cutter in Sao Paulo state in southern Brazil.
This time he is accompanied by three sons, also laboring in the cane fields, and a daughter, who cooks for the group. Every month, they send 2,000 reais ($925) to the rest of the family.
The Santos' story is that of most people in Princesa Isabel, a town of 19,000 people in the arid backlands of Paraiba state in northeastern Brazil. With few other options to make a living, three out of 10 residents have worked as cane cutters.
The days are numbered for manual cane cutting, a grueling job once done by slaves, in top cane producing states such as Sao Paulo and Minas Gerais, which account for 70 percent of Brazil's sugar cane crop.
For environmental and public health reasons, cane burning in these states must be phased out by 2014 in flatlands and by 2017 in hilly areas. Similar initiatives are being discussed in fast-growing farming states Mato Grosso do Sul and Goias.
But the change is likely to have a big impact on cane cutters and the families who depend on them.
Controlled burning has long been used in cane plantations to remove foliage and make it easier for workers to move about the fields. But when humidity is low, thick clouds of black smoke billow above the fields.
Every year, a larger share of the crop is harvested by machines, a trend that is starting to drive up unemployment in faraway towns like Princesa Isabel.