The sun has just risen as Mailson Oliva, 11, trudges through a muddy section of rainforest looking skyward in the search for açaí berries in the canopy above. When he spots a bunch of ripe fruit, he jumps onto the tree trunk, grasping it with his feet, and slithers up with his knife – all the way up to the berries, seen as a superfood in many wealthy countries. He then slides back down the trunk, throws the bunch onto a pile and moves on to the next tree.

At one point, Mailson pauses briefly. Three or four meters up in the air, he wipes the sweat from his face and says his legs hurt. "No time for that, keep going," his father calls over from the neighboring palm, his mouth broadening in a toothless grin.

So Mailson – a chubby cheeked peconheiro, as the açaí pickers in the Amazon region are called, a moniker that stems from the burlap strap they tie around their feet to help them climb – does what his father says. Just another child laborer like his brother Nando before him, who reached the age of majority last year. And like his sisters Giuliana, 13, and Giovana, 16, who strip the berries from the branches with their hands stained purple by the açaí juice. Later, they set the full baskets on the dock in front of their house so that the boatsmen can see that they have something to sell.

It is just another day for a Brazilian family that makes ends meet by harvesting this fruit on the banks of an Amazon tributary. In São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, açaí is seen as the new miracle food for fitness and health, just as it is in the United States, Dubai and also in Germany.

Cafés in trendy neighborhoods serve the berries as a creamy purée in bowls, and they are sold as smoothies and juice in the supermarkets. German sellers advertise the berries as being rich in vitamins and antioxidants, useful not only for warding off heart and digestive complaints, but also for slowing down the aging process, boosting the immune system and promoting fitness.

A further argument in favor of the berry put forth by climate change activists is that açaí berries are not farmed in expansive monocultures, but grow in the wild, and that there is little or no rainforest destruction in their production. Families like the Olivas, who live along the rivers, pick them in the jungle behind their homes.

The açaí berry is seen as being good for the environment, sustainable and organic. It would almost be the perfect product – that is, if it weren’t for the children like Mailson doing a difficult and dangerous job at the very beginning of the production chain.

Every year, some 1.5 million tons of the berries are picked, with around 90 percent of them coming from the state of Pará. If you were to fly a drone above the area during the harvest period, you would likely see tens of thousands of minors clambering up the slender palm tree trunks and sliding back down.

Child labor is officially banned in Brazil, which is the reason public prosecutors are now investigating the açaí harvesting practices. "Picking isn’t just hard work, it is also extremely dangerous," says Jomar Souza, who leads the department for combating child labor at the labor inspection authority in Bélem, the capital of Pará. He speaks of "serious human rights violations."

Souza says there are cases of children breaking arms and legs falling from the trees, which can grow up to 20 meters tall. One boy, he says, is now confined to a wheelchair following a fall. Others have been bitten by snakes or spiders, he reports, while yet others have cut themselves with their knives or torn up the skin on their legs when the bark of the normally smooth trees is cracked.

Mailson says that his neighbor was impaled by a trunk when it snapped under his weight.

The risk of a tree breaking is lower when children are sent up the palm trees instead. And the families are prepared to do so because the number of baskets they sell determine whether they live in mere poverty – or in abject squalor.

Does it really have to be that way though?

Mailson’s father, according to a youth welfare office report, receives monthly pension payments at the level of the minimum wage and uses the açaí harvest to boost the family’s income. In a confidential interview, Mailson told a social worker from the authority that he regularly missed school. Because he works so long, he frequently misses the school boat that collects the children from the docks in front of their homes. Even though he is now repeating the fourth grade, Mailson is unable to read.

His story is typical of those who spend their childhoods picking açaí berries. The social worker Maria Rodrigues has the accounts collected in her notebook as she sits together with Mailson on the veranda one morning in December. Rodrigues works at the child welfare office in Igarapé-Miri, the nearest town, located about an hour away by boat. The town bills itself as the global capital of açaí.

"And?" she asks. "Are you now going to school regularly?" Mailson nods. She then wants to know if he has learned how to write his own name yet. Mailson asks for a pen and then slowly scrawls his name, letter after letter, onto a sheet of paper.

"I’m tired," he says, before jumping into the river as though he’s trying to get away from all of the uncomfortable questions.

Mailson is a shy boy who simply shrugs his shoulders when asked about his dreams – almost as if dreams were the same things as books and toys, luxuries he can't afford. At one point, he says: policeman. And he also says that he misses his mother, who just left without a word three years ago.

Mailson was seven when his father sent him up a palm tree for the first time. He says he doesn’t like the work and that he’s afraid of falling. But his father, he continues, doesn’t allow himself to be contradicted. When he’s tired, his father tells him that he should have something to drink, and when his legs hurt, his father says he shouldn’t make such a big deal out of it.

In August and September, when the palms are heavy with berries, the family can pick between 20 and 25 baskets per day. It's a race against time, and not just because the ripe berries go bad quickly. For as long as there are açaí berries to pick, the family must earn enough so that they can feed themselves in the hard months of January to June. Because it’s not always enough, their veranda is full of boat engine parts, water pumps and broken televisions, junk that Mailson’s father tries to sell or repair.

When the school boat honks at shortly before noon, Mailson runs down the dock. A short time later, he is sitting at his desk with 20 other schoolchildren at the next riverbend. The teacher asks the children a few questions.

How many of you pick açaí?

Almost all the hands go up.

How many of you have ever fallen out of a tree?

Half the hands go up.

Any other injuries?

The children all start talking over each other.

It isn’t easy to produce reliable statistics in this region. One study from 2016 estimated that around 120,000 families are involved in harvesting açaí berries. When state prosecutors traveled through the Igarapé-Miri region in July, they learned that some schools had adjusted their holiday schedules to account for the açaí harvest. Rodrigues, the social worker, believes that many parents only send their children to school so that they don’t lose support from the state welfare program Bolsa Família, which is contingent on school attendance.

Given the economic situation faced by numerous families in the region, the fact that many of the children are too tired to pay attention in class is of secondary importance.

If you ask Seu Manoel, Mailson’s father, what he thinks about it, he just gazes back with a quizzical look on his face. He grew up on the opposite riverbank and started harvesting açaí at the age of seven. "It’s normal, isn’t it?" he says – as though climbing up a few trees to take care of the family’s needs were the same thing as feeding the machinery of a burgeoning global market.

"It’s part of our culture": That’s what the people here say, including Maison’s father, his teacher and his school-boat driver, who, after dropping the children off in the afternoon, continues chugging from dock to dock, buying up the daily harvests and bringing the berries to the next middlemen at the ports. It's also a sentiment repeated by the proud mayor of Igarapé-Miri, a man named Roberto Pina, who, as a member of the Workers Party, should perhaps have an interest in improving the situation. But Pina, himself a former peconheiro, is one of the largest producers in town.

Some 80 percent of the residents of the Igarapé-Miri region earn their keep with açaí – as pickers, middlemen or as stevedores in the harbor. Pina says that more than 100 trucks roll through the streets of his city – which is home to an Açaí Square, an Açaí Palace Hotel and an Açaí Pharmacy. In recent years, fully eight processing plants have sprung up, where the berries are crushed into a purée and frozen for shipping. A new port with four truck ramps is currently under construction down on the banks of the Maiauatá River.

On a recent afternoon, Pina was sitting in a dimly lit meeting room in his home, an open Bible in front of him. Pina says he doesn’t understand what the public prosecutors wanted from him when they made a recent visit to his office and spoke to him about child labor. The region used to be home to sawmills and sugarcane plantations, both of which destroyed the forest, he says. Now, the açaí berries have brought a bit of prosperity to the area and people are able to afford things like televisions and refrigerators. "And they want to take that away from us?" Pina asks.

Souza, from the labor authority, can only shake his head. He believes that such attitudes from politicians is one the reasons why so few cases are actually reported. The cities, the teachers and the families, he says, all completely ignore the problem because they harvest berries themselves or used to pick them when they were younger. Or because they believe that protesting wouldn’t change anything.

"Should the child welfare office take children away from families and do even more damage?" Souza asks. He then leans back on his leather sofa, takes a deep breath, and says that the situation is "complicated."

He says there needs to be more checks and more educational work, in addition to more pressure on the large companies making millions of dollars with açaí. The biggest challenge, though, is that the very beginning of the production chain lies in the informal economy. It is impossible to peer into the forests worked by families like the Olivas. The boat drivers who then buy the fruit from them arrive long after the work of picking has been completed; they don’t see anything untoward. The same is true for the factories that process the berries once they arrive in port.

It's for this reason that he is putting his hopes in the consumers in the West who expect transparent chains of production free of child labor. He hopes that people on the other side of the world will understand that an informal, cash-based business cannot be the foundation for sustainable structures. Because few pay taxes, the communities have no funds to invest in schools or universities. And children who do not receive an education have little chance of escaping this cycle of poverty.