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Two or three times a week, the seringueiros collect 12kg of wild rubber primarily destined for the soles of Veja trainers, made in Portugal in a fair-trade factory.

In the 19th Century, King Leopold II of Belgium ran the country as his own personal colony, forcing people to collect wild rubber for tyres, feeding Europe's hunger for bicycles and, in the next century, cars.

Under King Leopold II, the Belgians had systematically killed, terrorized and starved the Congolese population during a decades-long effort to enrich itself by extracting ivory, wild rubber and hardwoods from a territory 75 times larger than Belgium.

Kopp and Morillion chose to manufacture in Brazil because there was a good supply of wild rubber, organic cotton and factories where 80 percent of workers are unionised and pay is above minimum wage.

It was a land of subsistence farms and wild rubber extraction, plus “colonial plantations” producing cocoa, coffee and sugar.