Coronel Vasquez Bernardino, a gangly 25-year-old wearing a filthy Argentina football shirt and decrepit trainers, points to the wooden barn floor on which he and 17 other labourers slept during the summer.

Mr Vasquez has come with friends from his village in a remote part of Cajamarca, in Peru's northern highlands, to pick coffee in the Moyobamba region on the edge of the jungle. "This is good work," he mumbles awkwardly. "We come here for the summer, when there's no work for farm labourers in the highlands."