Fruits of wrath | The Wider Image

Thousands of day labourers have blocked roads, staged marches and held meetings with lawmakers since March to rail against the grind of picking strawberries, raspberries and blackberries in the Baja California peninsula for what they say is as little as $1 an hour.

Genaro Perfecto, 38, pictured above with his family, is part of a growing underclass frustrated over pay and conditions in https://www.art.com/ work that provides U.S. consumers with farm produce.

Huddled around a single flickering candle in a tiny wood and cardboard shack on scrubland in Mexico's northwest, impoverished labourer Perfecto and his family prepare to bed down for the night on a floor of bare earth.

His 3-year-old daughter asks for another blanket to keep out the cold, but they have run out - a sign of deep poverty in a life spent harvesting fruit bound for U.S. dining tables.

Having moved north to escape poverty in southern Mexico 15 years ago, fa ther-of-five Perfecto says he is too poor simply to up and move away from this dusty stretch of heavily-fumigated industrial farmland known as San Quintin.

Companies operating in the area say they pay workers fair wages and provide them with adequate healthcare coverage. Local government officials argue that recent protests over wages by fruit pickers were politically-motivated.

"If you're ill, or cut yourself in the fields, they don't pay the day (if you are out for treatment)," Perfecto said. "You keep quiet, and keep working covered in blood."

The 38-year-old's principal diet consists of refried beans or flour tortillas sprinkled with salt.



In the last few months, anger over conditions faced by fruit pickers, which even some conservative Mexican media have characterised as "near slavery", has boiled over.

On March 18, more than 200 protesting workers on the peninsula were arrested in a clash with local authorities.

Strawberries are left at the municipal garbage dump after a work stoppage by pickers.

On average, Perfecto picks around 110 kg of strawberries a day, and up to 200 kg in high season. He says he earns between 850 and 1,200 pesos ($56 to $79) in a week that regularly exceeds 50 hours. That equates to between about $1 and $2 an hour.

Payslips of five of some three dozen workers interviewed by Reuters showed them earning between 782 pesos and 1,210 pesos ($51 to $79) per week. The slips did not provide a clear breakdown of the hourly compensation.

When asked how much it paid per kilo, BerryMex, a leading fruit grower in the area, stated only that workers had an "average earning opportunity" of $5 to $9 an hour with top workers making up to $10 per hour.

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Among the labourers hauling heavy crates packed with strawberri es was Carmen Reyes, 34, who is seven months pregnant.



Reyes says she'll keep working as long as possible before the birth to keep earning, as she has done during her previous nine pregnancies. One of the children died at 2 months.

Like Perfecto, she lives in a makeshift shelter made from cardboard and plastic sheeting, and complains of rashes and skin discolouring from her work in the fields.

"When we're nearby cutting fruit, they don't care, they continue to fumigate," she said, gesturing to a white patch on her forehead. "They say it won' t harm us, but we think it does."

Writing by Edgard Garrido, Lizbeth Diaz

https://widerimage.reuters.com/story/fruits-of-wrath