RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Nothing is small when the subject is the Companhia de Entrepostos e Armazéns Gerais de São Paulo (São Paulo Warehousing and General Storage Company), known as Ceagesp.
Last Sunday’s Caminhos da Reportagem featured Ceagesp, the largest warehouse in Latin America for 51 years, confirming its mission of placing food on tables in São Paulo table and 1,500 other Brazilian municipalities.
For this reason, everything there is superlative: over 3 million tons of food, flowers, and fish are traded every year; almost R$9 (US$1.6) billion in financial turnover, and an area of 637,000 m2, where 50,000 people move through every day. There are another 13 points of sale throughout the interior of São Paulo state, and another 18 storage centers.
Rosana Keuly was 22 years old when she became one of the hundreds of coffee vendors at Ceagesp. One more woman in the midst of a predominantly male world. She tells how she learned to feel less uncomfortable with the compliments and how far she has come as a coffee seller.
Rubens Fidêncio, from Quadra, 160 km from the capital, is part of the fifth generation of a family dedicated to agriculture. He stresses the privilege of living a little more than an hour away from the warehouse, where his produce can be sold all year round.
A singer in his spare time, when he goes by the stage name Alysson Lima, João Paulo Neto, from Paraíba, is a loader at Ceagesp and talks about the daily routine of balancing a full cart that can’t tip over and producing a musical career.
Associação Nossa Turma, an institution born out of a child prostitution complaint 23 years ago, teaches more than 100 children in a day-care center and youths prepared to enter universities is also housed there.
There is also a Banco de Alimentos (Food Bank), which collects unsold products that do not meet sales standards but reach over 200 institutions and day care centers in the city.
Source: Agencia Brasil