Norberto is a plantation foreman in Chacras, Ecuador.
He is married, with one son, and is 35 years old.
His passion
Norberto is the jefe de campo (foreman) at the only mango plantation in Ecuador to be registered with Fairtrade. Norberto has only worked for one year as a plantation foreman year, but his work is his passion. “I’ve always wanted to make the most of my abilities, and fulfil my duties as well as I can.” His greatest pleasure comes at harvest time, when he sees the fruit they have grown. He is thrilled at the size of the recent crop. Norberto is also passionate about learning new skills, and is doing a distance learning course in computing. He travels into town on Saturdays, to the college where he can get access to a computer. If the plantation invests in a computer one day, he hopes it might become part of his job.
His daily life
Before joining the plantation, Norberto was a security guard at a bank. He supervises a team of about a dozen permanent workers. Norberto says the job was difficult at first, because he hadn’t managed people from the country before, and they don’t take orders from strangers easily. But, ‘thanks to God’, he soon found his feet. He lives in a house on the plantation, and can use plantation land to cultivate beans and yucca. He also keeps hens and ducks. Norberto prefers living on the plantation to living in the town, where he says there’s a lot of robbery.
A better deal
Norberto’s mango plantation had only just been registered with Fairtrade at the time he was interviewed (January 2002). He hopes that the stable Fairtrade price will provide him with a degree of financial security. All workers on estates supplying Fairtrade must be paid at least the minimum legal wage - often ignored in Ecuador. At the moment, he says: “In the state the country is in, it’s impossible to save money’. Norberto’s main expense is food and he says that prices go up from week to week.