Labour flexibility in export horticulture: a case study of northeast Brazilian grape production

Abstract

This article analyses the nature and extent of labour flexibility, defined as lack of permanent and secure employment contracts, within an emerging export horticulture sector in northeast Brazil. Whilst much has been written about flexible employment systems in agriculture, it is important to show exactly why, how, and to what extent these systems are flexible, and conversely, what kinds of strategies and practices are available to workers to ameliorate their conditions within such systems. This article illustrates how a combination of processes – farms' ability to produce two harvests per annum, northern retailers' increasing demands for product quality, employers' requirements for relatively skilled labour, and workers' ability to organise and extract concessions from employers – contribute, within the conditions of the São Francisco valley, to specific labour regimes and forms of labour flexibility.

Keywords:

• labour flexibility
• labour systems
• rural trade unions
• export horticulture
• northeast Brazil

Notes

¹Data available from: http://statistics.defra.gov.uk/esg/publications/bhs/2007/fruit%20details.pdf (Accessed March 2008).

²The category ‘Grocery’ encompasses foods such as FFVs and meats, as well as small household goods.

³I am grateful to Katie Huston for alerting me to Guthman's work.

⁴This and the following data are derived from the Censo Fruticultura 2001 do Vale do São Francisco, produced in CD format by CODEVASF, the latest available.

⁵Despite their ability to produce and export two harvests per annum, climate change (increasing rain) during the first half of the year is pushing some farms towards concentrating production for the second export window – hence starting to harvest in September. Whether or not this will become a valley-wide phenomenon remains to be seen.

⁶This and the following data refer to the number of hectares in cultivation in 2003. Only the farms with the number of hectares under vines referenced were visited for research.

⁷COTIA was formed by Japanese settlers in Brazil in the 1920s. Its full name was Sociedade Cooperativa de Reponsabilidade dos Productores da Batada em Cotia – The Cooperative Responsible for the Potato Producers in Cotia (Makabe 1999, 714). Makabe notes how ‘With one crop after another, the Japanese came to dominate a narrow, highly specialised band of agriculture’ (1999, 708). COTIA members had been producing table grapes in São Paulo since the 1970s and brought their experience to the São Francisco valley. For more details see Makabe (1999), Damiani (1999), Gomes (2004), and Selwyn (2007a).

⁸The Juazeiro Agricultural Cooperative (Cooperativa Agrícola de Juazeiro– CAJ) is the biggest grape cooperative in the SF valley, marketing grapes and other fruits produced by its members. In 2003, it had 45 members with 300 hectares under grape production. In 2002, CAJ sold approximately half a million 8.5 kg crates of grapes on the domestic market and 350,000 crates on the export market. At the time of my fieldwork the cooperative was expecting to export close to half a million crates for the 2003 year, around 4,500 tons.

⁹CODEVASF –São Francisco River Basin Commission (Commissão do Vale do São Francisco); SUDENE – Superintendency for the Development of the Northeast (Superintendência do Desenvolvimento do Nordeste).

¹⁰For more detail on this subject see Selwyn (2007b).

¹¹Interview with worker, Petrolina, July 2003.

¹²Interview, Petrolina, 14 July 2002.

¹³Available at: http://www.ilo.org/public/english/bureau/inst/papers/1997/dp94 [Accessed July 2008].

¹⁴Interview with farm manager, Petrolina, July 2003.

¹⁵Interview with agronomist, Special Fruit, June 2003. Whilst Special Fruit recruits a large percentage of its workers from Ceará, farms in the region recruit from elsewhere in the northeast and further afield.

¹⁶Interviews with workers, Logos Butia, Curaçá, March 2002.

¹⁷Interview with manager, Special Fruit, June 2003.

¹⁸Interview with worker, Petrolina, May 2002.

¹⁹Interview with owner, JMM, Petrolina, 2003.

²⁰Interview with farm owner, Petrolina, September, 2003.

²¹Interview with CAJ President, Juazeiro, June 2003.

²²Interview with manager at Special Fruit, Juazeiro, July 2003.

²³Interview with worker at Special Fruit, Juazeiro, July 2003.

²⁴Rural trade unions have the right established in the collective convention – the annually negotiated agreement between trade unions and employers – to enter farms for one hour during lunch breaks in order to make contact with their members and establish whether their rights are being upheld by the farms.

²⁵Confirmed by managers and workers on Special Fruit and local rural trade unions.

²⁶Interview with social programme director, Vale das Uvas, 2003.

²⁷Interview with manager at Brasil Uvas, June, 2003.

²⁸Interview with manager at Brasil Uvas, June, 2003.

²⁹Interview with psychologist, Special Fruit, March 2003.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ben Selwyn

The account that follows is based on doctoral research conducted in 2002–2003 at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, under the supervision of Henry Bernstein. I conducted open-ended semi-structured interviews in Portuguese with workers and farm managers and owners on 26 farms and with workers and trade unionists at the trade union headquarters in Petrolina. The open-ended approach enabled interviewees to introduce issues that they thought relevant, even if they were not part of my list of questions. I also collected secondary data from local development agencies and the library of the Federal University of Pernambuco, Recife. In this article I attempt to build on and update the analysis of flexible labour in the São Francisco valley by Collins and Krippner (1999). Their research was conducted before the establishment of a collective agreement between trade unions and employers in the São Francisco valley, and as will become apparent in this article, the trade union has had a significant impact on the evolution of labour relations in the region. I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for the Journal of Peasant Studies for their helpful comments and suggestions.