The Greenhouses of Almeria

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Along the Mediterranean coast, not far from where I live and mercifully hidden by a long straggling  mountain range is one of the world's biggest eyesores – the invernadero or greenhouse belt that runs roughly from  Adra to Almeria in Southern Spain.  Apart from the Great Wall of China, the greenhouses of Almeria are apparently the only other man-made structure you can see from outer space.  Driving through it on the autovia makes for  a surreal experience – a sea of shimmering plastic with the occasional glimpse of the real sea beyond, punctuated now and then by the skyline of some urban settlement like Roquetas de Mar – a tourist destination of sorts and also home to a colony of hookers from far flung corners of the world such as Russia and Eastern Europe who ply their trade among the expensive hotels that have recently sprung up there.  Not that I'm speaking from experience, mind.

 

Check out some of the images here which are pretty stunning http://www.amusingplanet.com/2013/08/the-greenhouses-of-almeria.html

 

The greenhouses of Almeria are the El Dorado of Southern Spain.  What was once  a sparsely populated, semi arid backwater thirty or forty years ago has been transformed into a 2 billion euro profit machine pumping out salads and cherry tomatoes for the supermarkets of Northern Europe.  Lately, the greenhouses have been making the news over here.  The reason? Illegal immigrants. It seems there may be as many as 100.000 of them living  there – typically  in ramshackle shelters made of plastic and wooden pallets. The chemicalised conditions in the greenhouses themselves , not to mention the high temperatures, are so appaling  that few Spanish workers would contemplate working in them.  Pay is piss-poor and the most poorly paid of all are the sub-saharan Africans who get 10-15 Euros for a long day's work if they are lucky.   But without these illegal migrant workers the whole industry would almost certainly collapse which is why their presence is tolerated and why the authorities turn a blind eye.

Check out these two excellent articles posted on my local Facebook site:

http://www.theguardian.com/business/2011/feb/07/spain-salad-growers-slaves-charities

and

http://english.periodismohumano.com/2011/11/04/the-spanish-cucumber%E2%80%99s-taste-of-slavery-i/

 

There is another aspect to this as well which is that the resultant superprofits these rip off merchants that operate the greenhouses make goes to sustain and enlarge what is by all accounts an environmental disaster zone. So many illegal wells have been sunk in the area that the water table has dropped significantly in places causing an ingress of saltwater from the sea to fill the vacuum created. As a result the crops die from salinisation.  What then happens mimics the pathology of a cancer as fresh greenhouses are built further inland and more illegal wells are sunk, leaving a wasteland of plastic behind. Christ knows how they are ever going to get rid of the stuff. A sperm whale recently died in the vicinity having swallowed a piece of plastic from the greenhouses.

 

It strikes me that the greenhouses of Almeria are a perfect metaphor of capitalism itself – its insanity, its stupid short termism and its overwhelming limitless greed

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