Patricia Simón · Photos: Javier Bauluz / Translation: Blanca G. Bertolaza

Shack among the greenhouses in Almería (Javier Bauluz/Piraván)

Thousands of kilometers of dirt tracks surrounded by plastic walls that let through enough light to grow a 2,000 million Euros a year business and that, at the same time, hide the exploitation of the thousands of people that make it possible. 40ºC under the crushing sun that can rise to 50º inside this sea of canvas that covers a great part of the region of Almería, more than 350 square kilometers, and that has turned this southern border of Europe into an industrial, economical and social test lab.

Shacks among the greenhouses in Almería (Javier Bauluz/Piraván). Pictures taken with Hipstamatic for iPhone, Lens: John S Flash: Off Film: Claunch 72 Monochrome

The dust raised by the car joins the layers that dull the plastics and that, along with the sun’s destroying effect, forces them to be changed every year by those men we see climbing on ladders and beams, among which are still some Spanish men working. The only signs along the road are the ones that announce “Shakira Eggplant. Effective, high and constant yield” or “California pepper, matures to red, for late transplants”, some of the new varieties of the season. In this beehive the streets have no names or distinct signs for the eyes of a visitor, but they are full of them for its inhabitants. For example, around a corner, a mound of rotting garbage crossed by a greenish stream coming from a small wooden hut, tells us that we have arrived at one of the more than 100 shanty towns in the region where the poorest workers live.

Hakim is one of them. He comes out to greet us along with other Moroccan men who for the last three years have been building their shelters with pallets and pieces of the omnipresent plastic from crops that produce two and a half tons of residues every year. From this higher ground, the eyes get lost in a horizon that at some point flows into the Mediterranean sea, the one that separates them about 200 km from their country, while they dive in this other ocean under which their strength fades away, to earn their living.

They greet us warmly, but they stay serious. It is 11 a.m. and they are not working. It is not unusual. The crisis unleashed towards the end of May by the accusation by the German authorities that pointed towards Almería as the origin of the E. Coli outbreak that killed more than 30 people and infected 3,000 more, according to the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control, sank exports in the region. This added to the end of growing season of crops such as tomatoes and watermelons, some of the most important in the region at this time.

Google Maps screenshot of part of the region of Almería covered by greenhouses

Hakim traveled from Tangier to Barcelona hidden on the bottom of a truck when he was 19. A two-day trip, bearing his own weight, the terrible heat of the motor and the fear of falling and being ran over. Those are just some of the thoughts that ran through his mind, and also those of the hundreds of young men that have gotten to the Peninsula this way. Some died along the way.

Hakim in the shack he shares with his cousin and a friend (Javier Bauluz/Piraván)

Hakim is now 22, and has a smile that hides a sour discourse and that breaks out in laughter in the most serious moments. “My father told me to stay, but I had seen a lot of friends that came back to Morocco with a car, money, a house… And I wanted that. You hear that things are bad here, but all we want is Spain”.

We are inside the shack Hakim shares with his cousin and another friend. The floor is the very soil found in Almeria’s greenhouses. The walls, leftover plastics and pallets. Some sticky flies buzzing around electrify the sizzling atmosphere. “When he needs workers, the boss comes and picks out the people he wants. We go to the greenhouse and we work, work work. We pick watermelons, tomatoes, remove weeds… All the work the greenhouse needs for eight hours. When the day is over, they pay 20, 25 Euros. No contract, nothing”.

Council of Agriculture and Fisheries of Andalucía

And that is how thousands of people are brought to a dead end that keeps them vulnerable and living clandestinely. Hakim does not have a contract and thus cannot apply for a residence permit although he has already lived here for the three-year period the law determines. In turn, since he does not have a residence permit he can only aspire to being clandestine and to the continuous and paralyzing fear of being deported after so many years of suffering, and to being exploited by some agricultural entrepreneurs. The last collective agreement they signed with trade unions established the minimum wage for an eight-hour workday at 44 Euros. But of all the workers we have been able to talk to, the best-paid are the Romanians, with an average salary of 35 Euros. And, according to Hakim and other sources, the worst paid are Sub-Saharan Africans, which in some ways they perceive as unfair competition: “They work for ten or fifteen Euros. But when the price of tomatoes is high, it is worth 70 or 80 cents per kilogram. The boss makes between 5,000 and 7,000 Euros for each truck, and we pick a truck-full in two or three hours and get paid about nine Euros”. Figures that make up a chart where profit margins grow exponentially until they reach the consumers, who can pay up to 1,50 Euros for one kilo of tomatoes in the supermarket.

At sundown the roads of Almería fill up with bicycles. It is the means of transport most workers use. What we see in the background is the kitchen in Hakim’s shack (Javier Bauluz/Piraván)

Meanwhile, public authorities and associations of agricultural entrepreneurs maintain that in Almería there are as many workers without contracts as in any other region. But the cucumber crisis has unveiled the contradictions between the official stand and the figures. Data-crossing is merciless with the official stand. Spain is the world’s second exporter of fruit and vegetables, and Almería is the third most important region in this sector, behind Murcia and Valencia: 18.3% of the country’s total. In 2010 3.7 million tons were exported, according to data from the cooperatives, with a value of 3,640 million Euros. In the specific case of cucumbers and pickles, of which 87% come from this region, 450,000 tons went to the EU in 2010, mostly to Germany, according to Customs data for that same year. A strategic sector of the Spanish economy that according to the Spanish Federation of Fruit and Vegetables Producers and Exporters Associations, suffered weekly 200 million Euro losses during the cucumber crisis.

As a consequence of all this, the main trade union, UGT-FITG, lamented that 50,000 Spanish workers had been affected by the crisis. But data published by the Interior and Labor Ministry about June 2011 revealed that agricultural unemployment had only increased by 390 compared to the previous month. And if we add in the services sector, which includes tasks such as food processing or transport, the increase was of 1162 unemployed workers.

Shacks in an abandoned industrial building (Javier Bauluz/Piraván)

Both figures are lower than those in June 2010, a month in which important seasons are over, so unemployment usually rises. But what’s more, this year there were 1,000 more affiliates to the Special Agricultural Social Security Scheme, going from 40,800 to 41,900 workers in this sector. Figures that can hardly correspond with an economic downturn that in effect meant that two tons of vegetables ended up in dumps every day and that, added to verification on the ground and the denunciations NGO’s and trade unions such as el Obrero del Campo (the Field Worker) have been making for years, inevitably lead us to calculate that thousands of people must be working without a contract in this region.

Conclusions strengthened by the results of the last census in 2010: the number of foreigners registered in the region of Almería multiplied by 9 in the last decade. From 15,000 people registered in 1999 to 170,000 new residents registered in 2010, 128,000 of which were foreigners. Of those, 65,000 come from countries within the European Union (28,000 of them from Romania), and the other half, from Morocco (38,000), Latin America (19,000), Sub-Saharan Africa (13,000) and from European but non-EU countries (5,200), in that order. In other words, Almería has increased its population with about 90,000 foreigners from impoverished countries, about 65 to 75 per cent of them, men. But the number of affiliates to the special agricultural scheme is just 41,000 people, including Spanish nationals.

Temporary and for specific work or service contracts. Source: Council of Agriculture and Fisheries of Andalucía

To contrast this information with Almería’s three main agricultural entrepreneurs associations, we got in contact with the Young Farmers Association of Almería (ASAJA), the Small Farmers Union (UPA) and the Association of Fruit and Vegetable Harvesting and Exporting Businesses of Almería (COEXPHAL). Only the first one has answered our questions through its press office. To the question of how many people they estimate are working without a contract in the region of Almería the answer is categorical: “My answer has to be zero”. About how much is being paid for each workday, ASAJA’s spokesperson maintains that it is being paid at over the 44 Euros stipulated in the collective agreement “because, sometimes, they are given lodging, food, drink… services that are not accounted for”.

Spitou Mendy at one of the SOC offices (J.B./Piraván)

Spitou Mendy, a Senegalese Spanish philology graduate and Spanish teacher in his country who emigrated to Europe “like everyone else, because we are economic refugees”, has become a well-known face in the last couple of years. As spokesman for the Field Workers Union (SOC), he has been the face and the voice of the most combative organization against the violation of these workers’ basic rights. After seeing and feeling the third-world misery these people live in as in an invisible underworld outrageously ignored by the authorities, but also by the rich and developmental world that surrounds it, his combative discourse seems to be one of the few that take into account the misery that drowns these workers. “The fact that the Andalusian Regional Government’s delegate of agriculture says that there are no more people working without documents or without a contract here than in other places of Europe is… What happens is that this labor force carries no additional costs. And that is called fraud. The Administration is helping this country sink. And the fact that I, a foreign citizen is able to explain it and say it, is unbelievable to them. They think it’s impossible for an immigrant to be able to do an analysis of the social situation”.

2010 basic figures in Andalucía. Source: Council of Agriculture and Fisheries of Andalucía

On the employers, the agricultural entrepreneurs’ side, we have to talk about the peculiarities of intensive farming. Juan Miralles, president of Almería Acoge, sums up the administrative difficulties this group finds to make contracts: “The sector’s collective agreement says that contracts must be yearly. And agriculture here is seasonal and with important specific work peaks. Also unforeseen events can happen, such as an epidemic or what has happened with the E. Coli, where there is no work to be done and the employer is penalized for having a worker hired without paying him. The employers don’t want to have workers without contracts and to risk fines of 60,000 Euros, but the legal framework does not fit in with the reality of these crops”.

That is the same thing another farmer tells us, as he waits for a team of Romanian men and women to pick up a truckload of perfect and almost-identical eggplants. He is young and looks muscled. He is a farmer’s son, a computer science graduate who ended up taking care of the family business “because in the end you miss it”. The earth, perfectly traced in rows of same-sized plants, compact and grey, shows how it is not fertilized organically anymore. Intensive farming has grown increasingly complex in the last decade and the region has not kept up, according to this farmer: “It’s incredible that there is not a single local capital business that sells seeds and fertilizers, or a single canning factory to tin the bruised tomatoes that go to Murcia or Valencia to be made into tomato sauce”. Miguel Ángel is convinced that the losses caused by the German authorities won’t be recouped, but adds that it is not the only problem. “Sometimes prices are so low that it’s not worth selling. For example, eggplants being paid at 10, 15, 20 cents per kilo. Then I leave them on the side of the road, not too long because you can get a fine, in case someone wants to pick them up”.

In an article published by Gustavo Duch, member of ATTAC’s Scientific Board, about the E. Coli epidemic, he pointed out: “The system has been designed to produce something similar to food, at very low economic, social and environmental costs; but so it can yield high profits for those who commercialize it. Food, far from being considered a necessity and a right, is seen as a good like any other”. And to follow on that aphorism, the profit margin should be as big as possible. In the case of cucumbers, Duch calculates that “the efforts for growing, watering and harvesting a cucumber will pay back at about 0.17 Euros per kilo for the farmer. The consumer will pay 1.63 Euros per kilo. That is, a rise of over 800%”.

A young Romanian girl picks eggplants in Miguel Ángel’s greenhouse (Javier Bauluz/Piraván)

There are three ways to commercialize harvests: selling them to distributors such as Carrefour or Aldi –who control 60% of the EU trade -, directly to the stores, or to co-ops. Miguel Ángel will sell to a distributor with whom he already has an arranged price before planting. It’s lower than what he would get if he were in a co-op, but more stable and set up before hand: 30 cents per kilo. They will be sold in supermarkets at an average of 1 Euro per kilo. Three Romanian women and one man pick with the farmer the truckload of eggplants. “I pay them 35 Euros for an 8-hour workday. Here if you work today, you get paid today”.

Of the 210 million Euros in aid approved by the EU after the E. Coli crisis, 37 will go to the affected Spanish businessmen –although the Spanish government asked for 71- as long as they had not previously received Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) subsidies, about 6,500 farmers who received 7 million Euros this year. According to ASAJA’s spokesperson, agricultural businessmen have already begun to receive the settlement of the amount each one will get. To the question of whether the workers will receive part of that aid, the answer is: “No, workers have other ways to receive compensations”. However, the thousands of undocumented workers who could not work on those days which, therefore, got no wages and in many cases had to be attended and fed by the Red Cross and other humanitarian organizations, will benefit in no way from these big figures. Amounts that in many cases will be received by employers who use “slave labor”, as it has been described by renowned  Anti-Slavery International organization, something that if these journalists have found with no effort, casts a shadow of doubt over the Labor Ministry, for example, not finding it.

Roofs of the shacks built in a rickety industrial building (Javier Bauluz/Piraván)

This is the case of a group of Sub-Saharan men who live next to Hakim’s shanty town. They share a home and while one of them cooks, the rest wait sitting on a worn-out sofa or by the door. We are still surrounded by greenhouses, with a small water reservoir nearby that the owner of this house lets them use to drink and bathe, but it is not drinkable, so they, as well as Hakim and his neighbors have to spend a big part of their wages buying bottled water.

They don’t want to talk, they haven’t worked in a while and they can’t see the light at the end of the tunnel. They don’t know anyone who is being able to regularize their status, their meals are usually made up of the vegetables they find on the side of the road or that some of their employers give them, like now, a big fry-up of onions and tomatoes, and they can barely send any money to their families. It’s very hot in this dark room, they are tired of not working and of racism. In the social scale, they are the lowest ones.

Trade unionist Spitou welcomes us in a ground-floor apartment turned into SOC headquarters, in a neighborhood on the outskirts of the town of El Ejido, the place where an outbreak of xenophobia in the year 2000 caught the attention of national and international media after a young girl was murdered by a Moroccan immigrant with psychological issues. People close to him had warned about it and asked for help treating or institutionalizing him, but it never happened. The case set off a hunt for immigrants by part of the local Spanish population: dozens of homes and businesses were torched and for many days a lot of them did not go out on the street out of fear of being attacked.

The mayor, Juan Enciso, member of conservative Popular Party, played a key role not just through the omission of his duty

Immigrants in an assembly, hiding among the greenhouses in El Ejido in the year 2000 (J.B./Piraván)

to guarantee public safety, but also through his constant statements in which he justified the racist reaction because of the climate of insecurity supposedly caused by immigration. José María Aznar, at the time president of Spain, supported him by declaring that “it was very easy to criticize when you hadn’t been there”, but Labor and Social Affairs minister Manuel Pimentel, asked to work for integration and criticized that immigrants were lured as laborers but then denied their rights as people.

The result of that disagreement was Pimentel’s resignation and Enciso’s continuation as mayor, even after being expelled from the Popular Party and setting up his own party, the PAL, and keeping his post as mayor of El Ejido during the 8 months he spent in prison for five serious cases that are still pending, tied to an important corruption scheme. The mayor who openly told anyone who asked him that “at eight in the morning immigrants can’t be too many, at eight in the evening, they are all too many” ran El Ejido for 20 years, a town that is an example of the unsustainable development that devastates Almería.

The Police arrests an immigrant for protesting against the xenophobic attacks in El Ejido in the year 2000 (Javier Bauluz/Piraván)

Spitou has lived through this last decade, historical in its unprecedented economic growth, as a worker and trade unionist. And he has not seen any evolution. “I’ve been in Almería for ten years and I’ve always earned the same. When I arrived, immigrants were valuable, the employer had to go out to find workers. Today job instability makes for a huge market of undocumented workforce destined to decrease production costs. And from there instead of going forward, we have only gone back to centuries ago. These people come here to make the only system that can save us from the crisis work, because people still eat, farming goes on and everyone buys from Almería. However, those who have managed to get their residence permits or nationality have gone on to find a better life in Switzerland or France, doing the same but earning twice as much. Almería doesn’t integrate people, doesn’t train people, doesn’t educate people. Almería exploits people”.

“They only think of us as labor, we have no history, no right to be people with dignity. But I come from a country with a culture, I’ve had an education and many immigrants, like me, have received higher education, but we are economic refugees. Many have quit. After so many obstacles they have ended up believing that they are not worth anything. But we have to help them regain their self-esteem. If not, they destroy us. They’re doing it, exploiting us and telling us  ‘you don’t need to know anything, you just need to produce’. And those of us who are able to say it aren’t ‘friends’, they need to come after us”.

(Javier Bauluz/Piraván)

Spitou looks tired. And he is. He has just spent two days showing the underdevelopment that takes place in Almería to a team of journalists from northern Europe who have come to make a documentary. But physical exhaustion is not what weakens Spitou, it is the exhaustion that accompanies human rights activists in places where few people dare to raise their voice and where the immediate answer is harassment or isolation. He had to face these when he went with and showed up in an article in British newspaper The Guardian, titled “Spain’s salad growers are modern-day slaves, say charities”. The press and the local authorities denied the article’s content and accused Spitou, and the SOC, of damaging the region’s image. “It’s a shame that a civilized, modern society behaves this way. If some people are demanding something as basic as people who work from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. earning no less than 37 Euros, when the collective agreements say that their minimum wage is 44 Euros… But no one wants to pay that to immigrants. Of course there are Spanish people who earn that, just like there are Spanish people getting unemployment benefits because of the work of an undocumented immigrant without a contract. We think we are slaves because they force us to. That’s the basis of servitude and we must accept it to eat”.

ASAJA maintains that calling these working conditions slavery is “taking things out of context. It’s hard work, so hard that there have been times when Spanish people didn’t want to do it because of the sacrifice”.

But the network of “servitude”, as Spitou calls it, of “labor exploitation”, as other organizations and trade unions put it, or of “modern slavery”, as Anti-Slavery International describes it, is not limited to the greenhouse workers. The ludicrous economic growth in Almería was seen not just in the number of cars registered every year -20,000 from 2004 to 2007, compared to the fall to just 12,000 in 2008, when the crisis arrived- or in the “green shoots” in the shape of eye-catching gardens in the many new traffic circles in El Ejido, but also in the bright signs of “gentlemen’s clubs” that multiplied along the roads. And in the blind spots in roads, greenhouses and shacks where the bicycles rest too parked in front of rickety rooms. They are the homes of the slaves’ slaves.

To be continued

Shacks (Javier Bauluz/Piraván)