Assailed by mosquitoes and wary of snakes, Jorge Lengua walks watchfully through the Bolivian Amazon collecting Brazil nuts from the forest floor. Lengua, 56, wears rubber boots to protect his ankles ...

For each bag of 70 kilograms of nuts (about 154 pounds), which takes about eight hours to fill, a harvester earns the equivalent of about $40 - Copyright AFP/File ...

Lengua, 56, wears rubber boots to protect his ankles from stingers and fangs, and uses a long stick to pick up the softball-sized shells that contain about 20 nuts each. "The life of a nut harvester ...