At Los Alamos plantation in Ecuador, it would appear that no expense was spared to produce the Bonita brand bananas sold in the United States. The modern hacienda in its steamy corner of Ecuador, one of the most efficient in Latin America, takes up 3,000 acres, and employs 1,300 workers to tend banana plants fed by a state-of-the-art irrigation system. It is an example of how enduring the use of child labour remains in Latin America, where about 42 million children aged 5 to 14 have been working in recent years. The problem has been made more durable still by the competition that comes with a consolidated global market. Pressures on businesses to be efficient and produce profits are often passed on to the world's most vulnerable population, its poorest children. Child labour is used commonly on plantations, large and small.