ARE THERE CHICLE TREE JOBS FOR PEOPLE?
Yes. The Chicle gum is collected from wild trees in the forest. A worker, called a chiclero may climb as high as 50 feet in a Chicle Tree to start making the zigzag cuts that release the rubbery chicle or latex from the tree. The chicle runs down the tree and collects in containers.(2) The Chicle Tree often grows near bat-pollinated and bat-planted allspice trees, so the chicleros may collect allspice berries as well as chicle latex in the forest to make their living.(4) There are jobs in the promising natural chewing gum business (6) and there are also jobs collecting and marketing the delicious Sapodilla fruit. “NOTE”: July 2008 The internet webpage supporting that statement (Reference 6, below) has vanished. Research described by Redclift and others in Reference 7 suggests that the production of natural chicle-based chewing gum is troubled by a variety of problems. Those problems hamper supplying the chicle-based chewing gum market that does exist which is now primarily in Japan and
