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The Paiter have a great knowledge of agriculture and family gardens are cultivated by groups of brothers, in which a variety of products such as corn, manioc, potatoes, yams, beans, rice, bananas, peanuts, papaya, as well as cotton and tobacco are cultivated. The system of planting is swidden, each garden being abandoned after two years of use.

With regard to the sexual division of labor, traditionally it is up to the men to cut down the forests for the garden and to make arrows; while the women spin, make ceramics and baskets, cook, harvest and take care of the children. Men and women plant and fish.

They dedicate themselves to the gathering of fruits, honey, larvae, palm cabbage and other products of the forest. After 1981, on becoming the owners of the coffee plantations of the invaders who were expelled from their territory, they went on to sell coffee on the market. The financial income is used to buy products today considered indispensable, such as clothes, tools and food.

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They are good hunters and fishers. The hunt can last hours, or a whole day, or days, or even weeks. The women like to go together and at times they take the children. Women and children wait at designated places while the men go off on the hunt properly speaking. There are various techniques of hunting, like traps and hiding-places, where the hunter imitates the sound of several animals until they respond to his calls. Hunting is preferentially done with firearms, for they claim that bamboo is difficult to find these days.

After the hunt, the meat, the smoked fish and the fruits are distributed according to the degree of kinship.

The most prized game are the wild boar, the armadillo and, for the women with newborn children, the partridge (various species of birds of the Timanideus family, which are highly appreciated). They also eat curassow, wild pig, jacu, anteater and several types of monkey, and especially prefer the coati. There are, however, several species of monkeys that are the object of food taboos, such as the jaguar, the turtle, the tapir, the alligator, and, for the Gamep, the deer and the cutia (but these days the cutia is consumed, as well as the paca, which is no longer the object of food taboos). The deer, the anteaters and the tapirs are especially prohibited to the children (the latter two also being interdicted for the young men). The trumpeter is only permitted to the elderly people. The Paiter also do not eat any reptile or amphibian, nor eagles, rats, bats, ducks, socós, tucanos and capybaras.

According to the survey made by the NGO Kanindé, the fish consumed by the Paiter are those with scales, since those with skin are considered vectors of sickness. Only the electric eel can be utilized, since it is considered a special kind of fish. The principal rivers that contain fish and that are used by the Paiter community are the: Branco River, the Lobó River, the Gapó River and the Ribeirão River. Small streams near the villages are used, mainly by the children, for fishing with bow and arrow. The use of fish poison is also a traditional method of fishing in the period when the riverbeds are dried up. The hook, nylon lines and fishing nets were introduced and today are the most common methods of fishing.

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There is an aquaculture unit in the village of Lapetanha. The building of a dam, a tank (300 m²) and the purchase of tambaqui fishlings (3.000) were the result of a pilot project (which includes aquaculture, cattle-raising, agroforestry management and “white” farming) done by the Paiter association Metareilá, with financing from the Ministries of Agriculture, Supplies, and Agrarian Reform.

Cooperation in the garden involves various rules among the Paiter lineages. The identification between labor and social organization is expressed when the whole longhouse population goes off together to the garden; or by the obligation of each man to offer several days of labor to his non-co-resident kin. Thus, married brothers help each other out when they live in different houses; sons-in-law help their fathers-in-law; brothers-in-law go to the garden of their sister’s husband, their potential father-in-law.

The rules for cooperation are extremely varied. For example, the chief of a longhouse goes to gather with his classificatory sons, even though only one of them lives in his longhouse. Why does the married son who lives in another longhouse go with him instead of going to gather with his co-residents? It’s because part of a lineage is preparing a iatir (offering of beverage or soup to other houses). The rule is that one of the men of the house, who is from another lineage, married with the classificatory daughters of the longhouse chief, not be present. It is the time of the rains and corn and the iatir is called meeg-aré: the "collective corn work party", "companion of the corn". Áre is the word that is used for the brothers; áre and aré can be thought of as variations on the same word, showing that the collective work party is a lineage matter (brothers belong to a same lineage). One only needs to observe that all the words for collective work parties refer to brothers: meeg-aré, sogai-aré (planting work party), gã manga aré (work party for making a garden, for cutting down the trees), soe-karé (hunting work party).

Click here and sees the species preferential cultivated by the Paiter

Coffee

The first experience of the Paiter with coffee cultivation occurred after the removal of the colonists in 1981, when these left many behind many coffee plantations inside the indigenous land. These plantations were located in the areas all along each line (roads) of the INCRA colonization project, extending inside the reserve. The Paiter organized themselves by extended families to take care of the coffee plantations, taking advantage of the harvests of 1982 and to protect their territory from new invasions. Thus, villages were established on lines 08, 09, 10, 11 (four villages) , 12, and 14 (two villages).

The Paiter went on to take care of the coffee plantations and to commercialize this product, which at the time brought in a good return for them and thus they were introduced into the market economy. In the years that followed, however, coffee suffered a drastic decline in price and this discouraged the Paiter from continuing to cultivate. Many coffee plantations were abandoned. In the ‘90s, coffee once again was sold at a quite high price, which stimulated the Suruí to go back to cultivating. Today, in the villages that don’t exploit lumber, coffee cultivation is the main income-raising activity. These coffee gardens are family properties, however not all families have a plantation.

Part of the coffee produced is processed in the district of Riozinho, municipality of Cacoal, in the pounding machine that the FUNAI allows the Metareilá to use. The other part of the production is sold directly by the indigenous families to the processing companies. After processed, the coffee is sold in the city of Cacoal, generally without the presence of the FUNAI

In almost all the villages there is extensive cattle-raising. Several villages have corrals with tile roofs and cement floors and others don’t. The herds are small and belong to each family, varying from a few head to scores of cattle which are used for milk production for consumption and for sale on the meat market.