World trade of Latin American cotton nevertheless remains lively thanks to its extremely low production costs. Even reality-concealing official figures betray the wretched standards of pay for actual work. In Brazil it is done either for hunger wages or on a serf basis. In Guatemala, plantation owners boast of paying 19 quetzals (about $10) a month, most of it in kind at prices they themselves determine. Mexican migrant workers, moving from harvest to harvest at $1.50 a day, suffer from underemployment and consequent undernutrition. The lot of Nicaraguan cotton workers is much worse, and
...more
Profits from low production costs due to wages that are barely enough to survive
