It upset me too susan I do try and not buy imported vegetables .
I felt very sorry for the young man articulate even in a language not his own and obviously intelligent doing this brute work in appalling circumstances.

There are many North Africans in Spain they are all taken advantage of in some way .

No wonder they want to come to the uk we are at least humane.

Saw this on a job seeking site giving wages for farm workers
The below was for a man over 25 .

Younger people start at the very bottom about £7 an hour .

An experienced Farm Worker with 10-19 years of experience earns an average total compensation of £9.29 based on 95 salaries. In their late career (20 years and higher), employees earn an average total compensation of £10.

I don’t know where you live OGF but I live in the Cotswolds .
There are practically no farm labourers as such . The farms are run by farmers who inherited the farms from their parents their own children having been to the prestigious agricultural college nearby drive the tractors and will eventually come into their own. Farm labourers have as much chance of buying a farm as fly in the sky . Unless you are a pop star or other celebrity how does anyone buy a farm ? all the former farm workers ‘tied’ cottages Have been sold and renovated as bijou residences for those who aspire to country living and walk about in green wellies ( the £200 + a pair type ) in the rural village I live in there is not one single ‘farm labourer living in a house because there is not one single farm labourer.. In most of the picturesque cotswold villages it’s the same . There are practically no one living in them who works on the land unless they are the farmers sons. Even when I was younger farm labourers didn’t start at the bottom and work up . Once a farm labourer always a farm labourer working up was not an option . Farms were passed on to farmers sons ( no inheritance tax) who if they didn’t have a farm managed the farms of other farmers. In my village now one farmer works his own land . Another works his own land ( that he inherited from his father ) and employs one general labourer - that lives in social housing in the town 11 miles away . The rest of the land hundreds of acres is owned by the main land aristocratic owner of the region . He does employ people - none of whom live in the village . His own father had many tied cottages but over time time sold them off . None were affordable to farm labourers or their children who usually moved as adults into nearby towns . Only the well off live in the countryside here . A house sold in the village lately . It’s unique but not large with no land and sold for the staggering price of £800,000 . Farms cost millions of pounds even should they come up for sale .There is a massive divide between the rich and the poor . The haves and the have nots perhaps things are different where you are but somehow I doubt it .
Foreign farm workers are not generally employed by farmer jones but by massive corporate farms supplying supermarkets . They are merely cogs in a wheel of the vast factory farming machine . Most farms are highly mechanised they don’t need armies of farm labourers . Only the more delicate fruits and veg need physical labour and this is seasonal . How do you build a life on seasonal labour ? So you break your back for six weeks each summer what then ? As many people are NOT lazy why aren’t they all flocking to pick veg? The most usual reason is that is does not give a living wage in this country .
It’s the same in other countries .
In Spain those plastic greenhouses we were talking about in are not worked on by Spanish peons but by poor illegal immigrants from North Africa who live and work in appalling conditions to provide the haves of Europe with off season strawberries .

That is the truth about farming today .

Plastic in the Mediterranean is killing the sea life.
Much of this comes from Almeria in Spain where hundreds of acres of plastic greenhouses produce luxury vegetables for Europe.
All the plastic degrades and ends up in the Med as micro fibers.
Unless things change drastically it will become a filthy barren sea.
its time we stopped buying out of season veg its wrong.

It is a very bad situation but people like Simon Reeve and David Attenborough are likened to someone who throws a hand grenade into a room and then fly off to another location to make another startling documentary and earn some more money.

David Attenborough used to be good when he introduced many people to flora and fauna in far flung places that they would likely never see. I learnt a lot from his interesting documentaries, but then he changed and became a warrior for the planet, criticising everything that man has done to nature, he being one of them!

We have no jurisdiction over Spain, we can just wring our hands and gnash our teeth, not realising that we have just as bad problems here at home. The Spanish government are responsible for allowing this to carry on, and you just can't go waltzing into another country and tell them how conduct their affairs, would you accept them telling us? And may I remind everyone that Spain is part of the EU and they [the EU] don't care as long as the trade goes on and lots of money changes hands, mostly their hands.

These diversionary tactics just prevent people looking at our own back yard.

Muddy i only shop in supermarkets and i think all theirs is imported from these horrible places . Do supermarkets sell unimported fruit and veg . There are no farm shops near me sadly .

Ill never forget that lovely man telling us of how they are all treated so badly

But why can't they grow this out of season veg and dispose of the plastic properly?

Thanks for that Muddy, a good post, but very different where I live....