Like coconut water? Ever wonder who picks the coconuts? Men and women in India climb 80 feet up bare tree trunks to harvest them
- Climbing up and down tall coconut palms all day to harvest the nuts takes guts, agility, and stamina. Thankfully, new equipment has made the job safer in India
- The 50,000 men – and increasingly, women – who do the job in Kerala state are also better paid thanks to unionisation and machinery that lets them work faster
Rajeev Thuruthipilly Ouseph has an unusual job. The 50-year-old makes a living climbing some of the tallest palm trees in Kochi, in the southern Indian state of Kerala, to harvest coconuts.
Nearly 50,000 people are employed in this work in Kerala alone. Ouseph remembers a time when coconut climbers had to rely on the strength of their arms and legs, wrapping them around the sturdy tree trunks and shimmying up the cool, smooth bark to reach the coconuts at the very top.
With some palm trees the size of mini-skyscrapers at 25 metres (82ft) tall, and with no safety equipment to speak of, it used to be a profession fraught with danger. One study, published in a medical journal in 2012, looked into 240 climbers under the age of 55 and found that eight had fallen from trees, and that four of the falls were either fatal or had caused severe disability.
Injuries and lacerations were common, particularly to the soles of the feet. Some climbers could no longer wear flip-flops because their toes could not grip. A climber’s life is different now.
In recent years the industry has seen sweeping changes that have been good for coconut harvesters, who now routinely use safety gear and have dramatically increased their earnings.
“Ten years ago, when I first started out in the industry, things started to change,” Ouseph says. “The industry unionised. Coconut climbers like us were trained to use protective equipment and metal machinery that could help us scale the tree quicker. We began to earn more.”