World-ecology under plastic: an analysis of the articulation between the exploitation of nature, racism and sexism in the production of berries in Huelva (Spain)

Abstract

The province of Huelva, in Andalusia (Spain), is the first strawberry exporting area in Europe. Based on an intensive use of inputs applied on sterilized land, this sector is an archetype of agricultural industrialization, marking the decisive influence of capitalist activity on the biosphere right down to the landscape.
Considered red gold for decades, this monoculture entered into crisis in the mid-1990s. Despite the continuous increase in input costs, the price per kilogram of strawberries remains stable, with supermarkets and input suppliers controlling the agrifood chain. To maintain profitability, farmers have followed three strategies: increasing production per hectare through technical intensification of production, introducing new berries cultures, and making wages an adjustment variable. This last one, has been possible through the employment of a diversified migrant workforce. Since the 90’s, various labor substitutions processes have resulted in a segmented labor market by origin, gender, migration status and work relationship. From the year 2000, an important part of the labor force have been women employed through a temporary migration program named contratación en origen. Morocco has been the main country of recruitment since 2008. Besides Moroccan workers, the sector employs North and West African workers, with or without work permits, an important number of Eastern European workers coming seasonally through work agencies, and Spanish women workers, mainly in the packing stations. The rise of unemployment caused by the economic crisis limited the contratación en origen between 2012 and 2017. However, this program is very appreciated by employers who have been demanding its reinstatement, as it guarantees a flexible and non-demanding labor force, available throughout the campaign, even if at certain times the work is scarce. In 2017, it was reactivated with more workers than ever.
Based on qualitative material gathered between 2009 and 2012, and updated in 2019, we will address several dimensions of an agro-migration regime constitutive of this land designed by capitalist world-ecology. The paper will focus on the contratación en origen held with Morocco since 2006. Financed by European Union money, this program aims to facilitate the movement of women workers who must return to Morocco after the season ends. To this end, a series of criteria are established based on racist and sexist stereotypes that define rural Moroccan women mainly as mothers and wives to justify their return to the country when strawberry season is over. To participate in the program, it is necessary to be a woman of rural and poor origin and to have dependent children under 14 years old. It means that capital accumulation in this agriculture is based on control over female farmworkers reproduction. Taking up the contributions of materialist feminism and cross-referencing them with political economy and world-ecology theory, we analyze this subordination of reproduction by production as an appropriation of nature as defined by Moore. Capitalist accumulation expands through commodity fronts (2015). Competition leads to a perpetual search for new territories – spatial or social – that have not yet been commodified and whose conquest opens new cycles of profitability. Capitalism appropriates these borderlands, reclaiming the free labor of women, nature and colonies (Mies, 1986) and justifying it by the fact that these cheap natures are objects that can be appropriated. Naturalization is the ideology that allows the material exploitation and appropriation of the “free gifts of nature”.
In this paper, we argue that, in intensive agriculture, accumulation is based on the exploitation of the web of life, embedded in control over the reproduction of female foreign farmworkers. We show how the imbrication between racism and sexism transforms Moroccan women into inputs for intensive agriculture and address the two dimensions of these power relations: their material appropriation and the ideology that identifies women and racialized people as nature that sustains the former.
We analyze how borders implemented by the contratación en origen mobilize gender and race to allow workforce exploitation. This temporary migration program is based on an economic articulation and a physical separation of the time-spaces of production and reproduction of labor power. Moroccan farmworkers are recruited as appropriated women (Guillaumin, 1992). It is because they carry out the bulk of domestic work, because they are materially involved in the rearing of children, and because this activity is considered their legitimate and main activity, that they are seen as ideal seasonal workers. That is to say, the women will work hard for their children that remain on the other side of the border and they will return home at the end of the season.
The constraints implied by the process of recruitment are reinforced by a legal captivity induced by the fact that residence permits are linked to a specific employer. In addition to this juridical captivity, the confinement in the dwellings weakens these workers’ capacity to negotiate their working conditions. The farms are often far from the villages. Isolation is increased by the fact that farmworkers generally do not speak Spanish and do not have any other means of transportation than the one normally provided once a week by the employer for shopping. The mechanisms of control over women’s bodies and sexuality are furthermore mobilized to impose discipline and control over workers, as well as to avoid them leaving the Program. The stigma of the woman of bad life and the prostitute, attributed to those who go out at night or to those who leave the Program to stay irregularly in Spain, patrols the borders of temporary work. This system constructs a vulnerable labor force ready to accept the poor working and living conditions offered. However, as Burawoy (1975) pointed out, the interdependence between home and host countries and the separation of production and reproduction tend to erode over time, usually leading to resistance and eventual labor replacement. In 2018 the pact of silence regarding the living and working conditions of foreign seasonal workers was finally broken. The collective mobilizations of Moroccan seasonal workers were organized to denounce poor living and working conditions and the existence of sexual abuse. This questioned the core of a recruitment program that had been designed as an example of ethical and orderly migration for 20 years. At the end of the season, various actors also reported that a significant number of female workers had not returned to Morocco at the end of their contracts. We read these forms of collective and individual resistance as signs of the erosion of this program. We will have to wait to see the impact of these emerging acts of resistance.