Future of Brazil’s babassu fruit breakers threatened by deforestation

Government plans to expand agribusiness in north-east Brazil could see native babassu forests - already hit by crop plantations - dissapear, ending a traditional way of life for thousands of families who depend on the fruit for their survival

Tereza Teodoro Sousa balances what looks like a small, hairless coconut on a hatchet and cracks it open with a wooden truncheon.

"I can't tell you how many years I've been doing this," she says, sitting in a babassu palm grove in Maranhio state in north-east Brazil. "The babassu gives me everything. The bread I gave my children came from here."