RIGHTS-BRAZIL: Child Labour Rampant in Tobacco Sector

By Clarinha Glock Reprint | | Print |

Clarinha Glock

PORTO ALEGRE, Brazil, Feb 2 1999 (IPS) - Six year old Daniel Lopes Lencine nimbly grasps the yellow leaves of dried tobacco and, in one swift agile movement, ties them up in a bigger leaf.

Tying bunches of tobacco here is dubbed “making dolls” by the tobacco workers, a term reminiscent of toys, making it sound almost like play. This is the way the adults and children of Camaquan, a municipal area in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, play down the heavy work they have done since time immemorial.

Daniel, his two little sisters and his cousin have passed the bulk of their childhood in this storeroom full of dried leaves, where the smell of tobacco is almost overwhelming. Nearby, their 36 year-old father, Manoel Herculano Lencine, rues the day he was born a tobacco worker.

And he has good reason to complain. One day, when he was opening a can of poison to spray on the tobacco plants, the wind blew the gas released against his legs. The scar left can be seen from afar, the skin lost its colour and the itching is sometimes unbearable.

“The Doctor said it was mycosis, but I told him it was poisoning,” said Lencine, who also suffers from dizziness and frequent headaches. The children are anaemic and have chronic bronchitis, but even so they work alongside their father.

His son already seems destined to have only half a childhood. He doesn’t go to school, but spends his time pulling tobacco out of the stove or “making dolls.” He once tied 30 kilograms of tobacco in one day, much to the pride of his father, although the latter claims he does not force the child to work.

Daniel rarely plays football or watches television. He is sometimes struck by attacks of vomiting and stomach ache, something also suffered by his sisters, Vanessa, four years old, and Daniela, two, who spend their day in the storeroom watching how their brother bunches the leaves.

“I have no one to leave them with, the land is not mine, I earn a percentage,” said the father.

“If everyone goes and studies, there will be no one left in agriculture,” stated Maria, the grandmother, showing her pride at having raised 10 children working with tobacco.

A study by the Employment Ministry Regional Office produced evidence that many children and adolescents are removed from school before the end of the school year to work with the tobacco, sharing the exhausting workload of their parents.

But now Municipal Councils for Childhood and Adolescence are fighting back, trying to keep the children in class.

Questionnaires completed in the classrooms showed researchers that the youngsters worked an average of nearly four and a half hours per day all year round.

The information collected in five municipal areas – Camaquan, Candelaria, Rio Pardo, Sao Lourenzo do Sul and Venancio Aires – all tobacco producing areas, were presented to the Health Ministry to help draw up measures to combat child labour – as has already been done in charcoal and sugar cane producing areas in other parts of Brazil.

Nearly 520,000 under 18’s are working in Rio Grande do Sul, and 32 percent of these are younger than 14 years old.

Lying 124 kilometers from Porto Alegre, the state capital, Camaquan has 62,000 inhabitants. The children here start working when they are around seven years old, but work longer days from the time they reach 14, something which naturally affects their performance in school.

The children work all week, including Saturdays, especially during the summer months when the harvests are brought in.

And stopping them working is no easy feat, say technicians from the Regional Office, as the tobacco is the only thing assuring the future of the region’s farmers. At present, 71,720 families in this state alone make a living from tobacco farming.

The average monthly income of these people is around 334.37 reals, or 278 dollars prior to devaluation of the Brazilian real – down more than 40 percent since January 13.

As casual agricultural workers are nearly impossible to find, the tobacco workers are forced to use their families to help them in these physically demanding tasks. Each harvest takes 200 days of work per person per year, nine times as much work as in the production of beans, for example.

Futhermore, there is a cultural question involved. The parents claim if the children do not learn how to work from an early age they will not want to stay in the countryside.

Employment Ministry staff will return to the region this year giving presentations on the risks of child labour and the importance of schooling. The Statute for the Child and Adolescent, actually bans night shift and unhealthy working conditions for children aged less than 18.

The problem is that children employed within the family system are not considered employees and the agreement between the tobacco companies and the farmers is made without formalising a agricultural or renting contract.

This makes the work of the Employment Ministry that much harder, as they cannot prove the law has been broken, said inspector Claudio Carvalho Menezes, whereby the Public Prosecutor’s office and the Mayorships must be involved to effectively eliminate the use of child labour.