Seasonal Workers in Mediterranean Agriculture

The Social Costs of Eating Fresh

Jörg Gertel, Sarah Ruth Sippel, Jörg Gertel, Sarah Ruth Sippel

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415711685
• eBook ISBN: 9781134655571
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Ecology
• Index: Biological Sciences

Over the last three decades there has been a rapid expansion of intensive production of fresh fruit and vegetables in the Mediterranean regions of south and west Europe. Much of this depends on migrating workers for seasonal labour, including from Eastern Europe, North Africa and Latin America. This book is the first to address global agro-migration complexes across the region.

It is argued that both intensive agricultural production and related working conditions are highly dynamic. Regional patterns have developed from small-scale family farming to become an industrialized part of the global agri-food system, which increasingly depends on seasonal labour. Simultaneously, consumer demand for year-round supply has caused relocations of the industry within Europe; areas of intensive greenhouse production have moved further south and even into North Africa. The authors investigate this Mediterranean agri-food system that transcends borders and is largely constituted by invisible seasonal work. By revealing the story of food commodities loaded with implications of private profit seeking, exploitation, exclusion and multiple insecurities, the book unmasks the hidden costs of fresh food provisioning.

Three case study areas are considered in detail: the French region of Provence, a traditional centre of fresh fruit and vegetable cultivation; the Spanish Almería region where intensive production has, accelerated dramatically since the 1970s; and Morocco where counter-seasonal production has recently been expanding. The book also includes commentaries that refer to complemetary insights on US-Mexico, Philippines-Canada and South Pacific mobilities.

Part I

Introduction

1 Seasonality and temporality in intensive agriculture

Jörg Gertel and Sarah Ruth Sippel

Among the wealth of fresh vegetables now available in a typical supermarket, some of the most convenient, attractive, and priciest options come from the world’s poorest countries. More than ever before, adding value to freshness depends on the least valued labor.

Susanne Freidberg (2009, p. 159) – Fresh

In the context of industrial agriculture, the season does not refer to the precise periods of cultivation anymore (harvest, pruning …). It is no longer framed by climatic or pedological constraints. It simply corresponds to the period, the longest possible, during which an employer can hope to take advantage of a docile, obedient and cheap workforce. The season has been annualised due to the success of the totalitarian dream of productivism and industrial leaders: the submission of the laws of nature to the “rules” of the market. It remains the alibi of the erosion of workers’ rights in agriculture.

Nicolas Duntze (2008, p. 8, o.t.) – Confédération paysanne

Individual exposure to the vagaries of commodity-and-labour markets inspires and promotes divisions, not unity; it puts a premium on competitive attitudes, while degrading collaboration and team work to the rank of temporary stratagems that need to be suspended or terminated the moment their benefits have been used up.

Zygmunt Bauman (2007, pp. 2–3) – Liquid Times

Agricultural production of fresh fruit and vegetables across Mediterranean spaces is highly dynamic, characterized by changing temporalities and spatialities. Within only three decades it has developed from small-scale family farming to become an industrialized part of the global agri-food complex while changing retail patterns and consumer demand for year-round supply has caused relocations of the industry within Europe. In order to realize earlier harvests and supply supplementary produce, production sites have moved more and more to the south and even jumped into North Africa, crossing a continental divide. The emergence and recent development of this Mediterranean agri-food system is deeply intertwined with, and constituted by, the exchange of capital, labour and agricultural commodities. Intensive agricultural production is not only highly competitive but also constrained by environmental conditions, energy and labour costs as well as by financial investments. Flows of fruit and vegetables from production to consumption are also increasingly buyer-driven; retailers and supermarkets govern value chains by dominant market shares and the power to set quality and sanitary standards. Within this context, the legal and illegal recruitment of cheap seasonal labour has become a crucial means to further reduce production costs. Agricultural labour markets are, however, ambiguous: they rely on the exploitation of (foreign) workers but nevertheless simultaneously constitute a significant income source and, hence, secure livelihoods. Agricultural production and labour markets are also subject to a complex system of regulation. National governments, the EU, free trade agreements and WTO requirements construct overlapping layers of Mediterranean spaces thus making and breaking borders, fixing and dissolving territories and places. Territorially stretched, fragmented relations and interactions between people and things, institutions and regulations, imaginations and discourses that reach far beyond Mediterranean territories thus construct agro-migration complexes across the Mediterranean. In order to capture these dynamics this book asks three questions:

1 What are the driving forces of mobilities for perishable food and precarious labour within Mediterranean agri-food complexes?

2 How does the seasonality of food and labour impact upon agricultural production and social reproduction, and vice versa?

3 What are the social costs of ‘eating fresh’ emerging from this globalizing agri-food system?

To address these questions, this volume investigates the various articulations between three areas of intensive agricultural production that not only cross a continental divide, but also ambiguously transgress and reproduce multiple north–south divisions: French Provence as the traditional centre of fresh fruit and vegetable cultivation in Europe; coastal areas in southern Spain, especially the Almería region, where industrial agriculture has accelerated dramatically since the 1970s; and regions of counter-seasonal production in Morocco that have been booming since the 1990s. Currently, over-exploitation of natural resources, social repercussions and food anxieties mark the limits of intensive production in the Western Mediterranean, tightened by the conjunction of economic, financial and social crises. Resulting from ecological ruptures, economic distortions as well as cultural fragmentations and reinterpretations, a plethora of invisible costs are attached to consumer societies’ reinvention of ‘eating fresh’. By pointing out these hidden costs we reveal the new dimensions of insecurities and dependencies that are inscribed in globalizing techno-liberal agri-food complexes. These unfold as new combinations of flexibility and insecurity on the one hand but also as combinations of flexibility and profit-seeking on the other. Therefore, the volume has three main objectives. First, the book provides an empirically grounded and historically embedded analysis of cross-continental exchange of agricultural products and labour. We ask how labour and fresh produce merge to be transformed into standardized commodities. We demonstrate how respective markets are constructed by various actors and driven by institutional regulations as well as by individual appropriations. Second, the book investigates the spaces of insecurity that are inscribed into intensive agricultural production and points to vulnerabilities and social ruptures. Insecure seasonal labour conditions have become a prerequisite of an industrialized agricultural system. We reveal, however, that even precarious employment, perpetuating social inequality, entails stabilizing effects for local livelihoods, leading to complex dependencies. Third, the book also tells the story of the social life of fruit and vegetables, which is absent from their presentation on clean, hygienic supermarket shelves. While fresh food is advertised as safe, containing high nutritive value, being an indispensable part of a balanced diet and a responsible modern lifestyle, this positive appearance is a deliberately produced illusion. Food commodities have a history that is loaded with the implications of private profit seeking, exploitation and multiple insecurities. We unravel production contexts and make individual faces and attached values visible.

Conceptual perspectives

This book has been inspired by three axes of inquiry around the entangled paths of socially constructing and representing food on the one hand and the old question of agricultural labour on the other hand. The first one comes from Susanne Freidberg’s (2009) plunge into the history of inventing and creating ‘fresh food’. She elucidates us on how ‘fresh’, as a category ascribed to food commodities, came into being and how ‘freshness’ relates not only to hidden labour but is also deeply entangled with technologies, the desire for convenience and significantly influenced by marketing. A second impulse originates from Michael Carolan’s (2011) thought provoking analysis on how ‘cheap’ cheap food really is. From environmental impacts to obesity to animal welfare he points us to the multiple facets of ‘real’ costs that are lurking in the current food system and reveals that the supposedly ‘knock-out argument’ of ‘cheapness’ is based on a very restricted, short-minded construction of ‘costs’. Our third framework stems from the ‘California Dream’ and its ‘underbelly’: the capitalist development, early intensification and economic success of Californian agriculture and the ugly, violent and dirty everyday lives of the workers this agriculture relied on (Mitchell, 1996). As an early model revealing the social costs of intensive agricultural production it will serve us as an important comparative dimension for the understanding of contemporary Mediterranean agro-migration complexes (see Epilogue). With these inspirations in mind, the book draws on two complementary bodies of literature which, so far, have only rarely been systematically integrated: on approaches to globalizing agri-food systems and on contributions on labour and migration; while referring to these combined theoretical insights we suggest analysing agro-migration complexes within more general reflections on the new temporalities that are shaping intensive agriculture.

Agri-food systems

Since the 1990s, the understanding of connections between agricultural production and food consumption has become a prospering interdisciplinary field of research. Approaches can mainly be subdivided into two lines of research. Global commodity/ value chain approaches¹ seek to analyse and conceptualize the interrelations between global patterns of production and consumption and the integration of local production into the world economy (see e.g. Raikes et al., 2000; Fold and Pritchard, 2005a; Gibbon and Ponte, 2005; Stringer and Le Heron, 2008; Bair, 2009). Referring to a similar theoretical background, Friedmann and McMichael elaborated the concept of ‘food regimes’ (Friedmann and McMichael, 1989). Food regimes theorists assume that commodity chains and production systems are anchored in and determined by changing hegemonic political regimes (Buttel, 2001; McMichael, 2009a). While agri-food researchers first investigated processes of industrialization, new technologies and the concentration of agricultural production, the decline of family farming and the increase of wage labour (cf. Friedland et al., 1991; Bonanno et al., 1994; Goodman and Watts, 1997), in a second step, they shifted focus onto emergence of powerful new global players (TNCs, transnational corporations) and strategies of global sourcing. These actors were identified as increasingly acting beyond the control of nation states, dominating market segments and operating in concentrated markets (Tolentino, 2000; Rama, 2005; kneen, 2003; Clapp and Fuchs, 2009). The power of supermarkets in establishing privately determined standards and their impact on the construction of quality has become an influential area of research (see e.g. Dolan and Humphrey, 2000; Busch and Bain, 2004; konefal et al., 2005; Burch and Lawrence, 2007). Standardizations of quality requirements lead to new complexities (Marsden and Murdoch, 2006) and were enabled by increasingly sophisticated technologies (Bourlakis et al., 2011). These transformations of global agri-food systems were accompanied, endorsed and pushed forward by agricultural policies on the national, international and global level. A small contingent of national economies and central trading blocks (EU, NAFTA) dominate structural development processes in the agricultural sector (Piccinini and Loseby, 2001; Gibbon and Ponte, 2005). More recently, consumers and new producer-consumer alliances, joined in alternative agri-food-movements, have been identified as a new group of actors challenging the current organization of the agri-food system (Maye et al., 2007; Friedland, 2008; Bonanno and Constance, 2008; Wright and Middendorf, 2008; Fischer and Hartmann, 2010; Goodman et al., 2012). A further key question concerns the embeddedness of agricultural markets in wider society and how processes of social reproduction and rural livelihoods are constitutive of global value chains (Gertel and Le Heron, 2011; Catley et al., 2012). Since the global food crisis in 2007/08 new processes are shaping global food systems – namely, the conjunction of new energy politics, related sudden and continuing food price spikes, worldwide food riots and new food insecurities, in combination with the shift from traditional to new investment assets such as agricultural land (Clapp and Cohen, 2009; Holt-Giménez and Patel, 2009; Gertel, 2010; Borras et al., 2011; Rosin et al., 2012; Allan et al., 2012; Clapp, 2012; GRAIN, 2012; Sassen, 2013; Gertel et al., forthcoming).

Geographies of labour and migration

While labour migration is intrinsically part of agricultural production systems, it still needs to be systematically linked to agri-food systems analysis. As part of the broad, interdisciplinary debate on global migration, labour migration and particularly the temporal and often circular migration patterns of seasonal workers in agriculture have been analysed through various theoretical lenses. In contrast to traditional, rather static theories of migration (e.g. assimilation and absorption theory, ‘push-pull’ factors, dual labour market theory; cf. Park, 1950; Eisenstadt, 1954; Gordon, 1964; Piore, 1979; Esser, 1980) current migration studies focus on networks and chains (see e.g. Massey, 1989; Massey et al. 1998), transnationality and transnational spaces (Basch et al., 1994; Castles and Miller, 2003; Faist, 2000; Pries, 2001; Glick Schiller and Faist, 2010; Glick Schiller and Simsek-Caglar, 2011) and are linking labour migration to production patterns of the global economy and to uneven development (see e.g. Sassen, 1988, 1998, 2000; Harvey, 2005a). More recent contributions on labour migration investigate the means of managing and controlling migration on different levels; authors refer to global governance approaches (Gabriel and Pellerin, 2010; kunz et al., 2011) and the construction and imagination of (labour) migration control (Guild and Mantu, 2011). At the same time, the potential of labour movements to build new global solidarities is explored (Bieler and Lindberg, 2011). In the European context, the investigation of means of management and control has provoked a vivid debate on European governance of labour migration on multinational, regional and bilateral levels (see OECD, 2004; Bonifazi et al., 2008; Black et al., 2010; kunz et al., 2011). Bilateral and partnership agreements between European member states and non-European states are of crucial importance for European intensive agricultural production schemes. This system is described as legally justifying spaces of exploitation that are based on criteria such as nationality, gender or matrimonial status (Etudes rurales, 2008; Mésini, 2010). Furthermore, in ‘labour geography’, a term coined by Herod (1997) within the context of radical economic geography, precarious forms of work, workers’ unions and agency of workers have been investigated and debated (see e.g. Herod, 2001; Bergene et al., 2010). In recent reviews of the field, however, the general absence of labour migration has been noted while a more holistic approach to workers as ‘working people’ and the integration with further strands in economic geography such as the global commodity/value chains literature has been called for (Castree, 2007; Coe, 2012b). In the sociology of agriculture context, Bonanno and Cavalcanti (2011) have recently integrated the analysis of capital and labour mobility using the example of agricultural productions in North and South America. Among others, they identify new mechanisms to enhance control over workers and weaken their economic and political strength by selecting production regions on the basis of the docility of workforce.

However, given the ongoing neoliberal expansion (Harvey, 2005a; Lewis, 2009), the accelerating financialization of exchange relations (Moore, 2010; krippner, 2011) and the recent food and financial crises (McMichael, 2009b), we see the need to more generally inquire how shifting seasonalities are inscribed into intensive agriculture. For this purpose, we aim to open up the field of temporalities that remains largely excluded from recent agri-food studies, particularly as it comprises issues beyond standard questions of agrarian studies such as the seasonality of products, long-term transformation of farm communities, commodification of labour, farm succession or short-term volatilities in agricultural markets (Bourdieu, 1977; Coe and Jordhus-Lier, 2010; Prakash, 2011; Gill, 2013). For this purpose we will juxtapose two positions: one by Nigel Thrift on time and temporality with one proposed by Doreen Massey on space and spatiality.²

Temporalities of intensive agriculture

In his early engagement with time and theory in human geography, Nigel Thrift (1977) starts his argument by claiming that time like space cannot be defined. As a multitude of characteristics are attached to time – sequence, duration, change, past, present, future – he considers time to be a ‘composite entity’. To conceptualize time he offers three perspectives: time as a ladder for processes to climb; as a locational and co-locational continuum; and as a resource (Thrift, 1977, p. 66). Thus, assumptions about linearity of progressive time, a time–space nexus and a subject-orientated appropriation of time govern this perspective. He explains:

The debate centres around two of time’s important properties – direction and passage. Whereas time’s arrow depicts the irreversible before-and-after succession of events, time’s passage refers to the distinction between past, present and future. The before-and-after series is a permanent series […]. This is the way we contemplate a chain of events in time; it is an ordering. But the series of past, present and future characterizes the way we experience events. It continually changes – the future becomes the past – so we cannot make statements that are permanent truths.

(Thrift, 1977, pp. 66–67, emphasis given)

Thrift further clarifies that time can only be subject to metric, but not to substance transformation. This allows for distinguishing between ontological aspects of time and the politics of its measurement and its standardization. Since industrialization, time ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of maps
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• List of acronyms
• Part I Introduction
• Part II France: Traditional centre of fruit and vegetable production
• Part III Spain: Symbol and embodiment of industrial agriculture
• Part IV Morocco: Booming sites of counter-seasonal production
• Part V Conclusion
• References
• Index