Brazil has a latex love factory

A worker pours natural rubber into a storage tank at the Natex factory that produces around 100 million condoms per year for the Brazilian Health Ministry in Xapuri, Acre State on October 7, 2014. Current production equates to a fifth of the 500 millions condoms -- known as "camisinhas de Venus" or little Venus shirts in Portuguese -- which the government hands out annually free of charge in a country where according to the UNAIDS non-government organization 730,000 people are HIV-positive. AFP PHOTO / YASUYOSHI CHIBA

Deep in Amazonia, Raimundo Pereira expertly cuts a gash in a rubber tree to collect white sap destined for the nearby factory at Xapuri, the world’s only producer of contraceptives made from tropical forest latex.

Raimundo’s precise, speedy technique bears witness to the fact that he started work aged just nine, accompanying his rubber-tapper father — himself the son of a rubber tapper — in shifts starting at dawn.