It looks like a flashback to the plantations of the 18th century. A hundred sugar cane workers, minuscule black figures in an immense ocher landscape of dry cane, dig into the ground with hoe blows. Then the cane will be planted.
They earn 41 reais – about eight euros – for a day's work quantified as the area marked out by a foreman with a measuring stick: 30 fathoms cut, about 6.6 kilometers of furrow. "I'll do it in eight hours and I'll drink five liters of water," calculates a worker, thin as his hoe. His father and his grandfather were cane cutters here. The most distant ancestors, slaves.
41 reais is not much these days in Brazil, where rising food and fuel prices have revived the specter of hunger in rural areas of Alagoas, Pernambuco, Ceará and other northeastern Brazilian states. Like grain and meat producers, sugar companies – which manufacture different kinds of sugar as well as biofuels – are in a good place. “The price of sugar goes up; wages, no”, says the worker. Brazil is the largest sugar producer in the world.
Incredibly, these cane workers are not the lowest paid in this part of Alagoas. With 64% of the population earning less than 5.5 dollars a day, this is the seventh poorest municipality in Brazil (the first six are all from the Amazon), according to the ranking by Marcelo Neri, from the Getulio Vargas Foundation. Adjacent Pernambuco, where presidential candidate Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was born 77 years ago, is the state in which poverty has increased the most since the start of the pandemic.
These cane growers eagerly await the first round of the presidential elections next Sunday and Lula's long-awaited victory, albeit in the second round, on October 29. "First of all, I hope he lowers prices," said the worker.
Nationwide, 30% of Lula's voters denounce food shortages. Many are in the Northeast. This historically poor region achieved spectacular social and infrastructural progress during the first twelve years of the Workers' Party governments (2002 to 2014) but has been one of the hardest hit since then. “If I could, I would vote for Lula a hundred times,” said a worker who cleared the land for farmers.
Other workers waited by a bus to be taken to the sugar mill, the Santo Antonio usina, in São Luís do Quitunde, where they live. The rise in food prices is a double whammy for them because "the owner won't let us grow our own crops on the company's property," said one worker.
Although most of Brazil's sugar is now grown in the southern state of Sao Paulo, cane is symbolically linked to the northeast, where the system of plantations and monocultures employed hundreds of thousands of slaves beginning in the 18th century and caused environmental disaster. De facto slavery lasted long after it was abolished in 1888.
Now, after the advances of the beginning of this century, the dark past returns. Workers at the Santo Antonio plant have not received a salary increase in ten years and working conditions are getting worse, they say. “They give us a fine of seven reais if we miss work, even due to illness. There are people here who faint in the heat. One recently died,” said a mustachioed worker who had been working and living on the property of the Santo Antonio plant for 25 years.
As with the federal environmental protection agencies, "Bolsonaro has emptied the labor surveillance institutions," said expert on rural workers Alexandre Valadares, of the Federal Institute of Applied Economic Research (IPEA). Likewise, the 2017 labor reform, which Bolsonaro has maintained, has dismantled collective agreements and eliminated rights.
Bolsonaro announced in May an anti-poverty plan called Auxilio Brasil, which distributes 600 reais to the 20 million poorest families. But there are few signs that he affects voting intentions. 54% of voters who earn less than 2,400 reais a month (467 euros), half of the electorate, say they will vote for Lula, compared to 25% for Bolsonaro, who only has an advantage over Lula in the highest paid voters, who they charge more than 7,000 reais a month (1,361 euros). But these, despite making much more noise on social networks, constitute only 13% of the electorate.
On the highway to Recife, another gang of workers was sitting on the shoulder surrounded by cane fields. A car parked next to it bore Lula's bumper sticker. “With Bolsonaro, gasoline has reached eight reais; in the years of Dilma it did not even reach five but there were protests throughout the country; Nobody protests against Bolsonaro,” said a worker who was cutting and distributing sugar canes to suck up the juice. Now the day of democracy arrives, the vote is compulsory and the silent majority of poor Brazilians will decide the result.
