The Cost of a Miracle

In Europe’s driest region, a vast plastic sea covers a flourishing agricultural system built on intensity and innovation. But the cracks in Almería’s “miracle” are growing too, Reuben J. Brown reports.

On the morning of the eviction, a slim slice of moon hung above an iron red sky. Traffic snaked through a highway diversion. On each side of the road, from the Sierra de Gador mountains to the Mediterranean Sea, a vast plastic patchwork was holding in the last of yesterday’s heat. Soon, the warren of roadways and tracks between these greenhouses would fill with workers, on bike, scooter and foot, making their way to start the day’s harvest. Near the south-eastern tip of Spain, greenhouses here cover an area the size of Munich, pumping out three million tons of tomatoes, cucumbers, courgettes, aubergines, peppers and melons per year. From the soil of Europe’s driest region, at the edge of its only desert, gushes five per cent of its fresh vegetables: the Miracle of Almería. 

This was how the days normally started for the 61 residents of Cortijo el Uno, going by scooter and bike to nearby greenhouses, hoping to find work, no matter how poorly paid. But today would be different. Today their homes would be destroyed. 

Owing to a court order issued two days prior, the legal wrangling was over. Cortijo el Uno would finally be cleared, and its residents, including children as young as 18 months, would be evicted. Whatever of their belongings remained in the settlement by 9:40 am on Tuesday, February 25th would be considered abandoned, flotsam in a plastic sea.

An hour before this deadline, civil guards and local police clustered near Cortijo el Uno’s entrance. The sliver of moon had all but disappeared. Overnight, a low barrier wall of breeze blocks and a toppled fridge-freezer had been constructed by members of Plataforma Derecho a Techo (the Right to a Roof Platform) in an attempt to slow the eviction. When a yellow backhoe arrived at 9:31 am it was the first structure to go. An excavator followed, dismantling houses constructed by residents from timber pallets and sheets of the same plastic used to roof the greenhouses they worked in.

A few remaining residents watched through a chainlink fence, their belongings piled up beside them: brooms, fridges, towels, suitcases; children’s bikes, toddler’s toys. “It is a very sad day,” Daniel Izuzquiza, a local Jesuit leader, told a huddle of reporters as a judicial entourage walked around the settlement, ensuring it was empty.

A Civil Guard officer waits outside a warehouse in Cortijo el Uno while a judicial entourage ensures its 18 residents have all left / Reuben J. Brown

The eviction had been requested by Cortijo el Uno’s landowner after he had been pressured by the local authority to clean up his plot or face a penalty fine, journalists who had been covering the eviction’s court procedures explained to me. Most of Cortijo el Uno’s residents did not know where they would be able to sleep now, and further reporting in IDEAL has found “several families” still seeking accommodation many weeks later. The shantytown was one of many in the region, unfortunate blots tucked away between the folds and down the lanes of the Almerían miracle. The last eviction was two years ago. 

Cortijo el Uno began as a short terrace of houses built as part of a grand plan by Spanish dictator Francisco Franco to repopulate rural Spain in the years after the civil war. Through the Instituto Nacional de Colonización y Desarrollo Rural, Franco founded villages and offered land to prospecting peasants and, with the help of early agronomists, encouraged them to experiment with ways to increase production from their otherwise marginal lands.

At that time, as still today, the natural soil here offered few prospects for agriculture. Only 200mm of rain fell per year, and fierce desiccating winds could ruin the year’s harvest in a single night. The sparse population was poor and mostly illiterate. 

The soil near Europe’s only desert, the Tabernas, bore little fruit before the introduction of plastic greenhouses / Reuben J. Brown

“My father and my mother never went to school,” Lola Gómez Ferrón told me on a tour of Clisol, her greenhouse complex and visitor centre near the southern tip of the Plastic Sea. Almería was a semi-desert, she said, and the living tough. “I remember perfectly: my father and my mother had crops of green beans, peppers, paprika, onion, tomato growing outside.A strong wind arrived one night and in just three, four hours it was enough to break the plants, destroy the crops, finish the harvest.”

Then, in the early 1960s, an experiment by the Instituto Nacional de Colonización (INC) succeeded in changing the landscape of Almería dramatically, and possibly forever. Having worked on the problem for nearly a decade through the 1950s, INC agronomists had achieved only modest productivity gains by adding a layer of beach sand to their topsoil to reduce evaporation and regulate root temperatures. But in 1963, on one experimental plot near Aguadulce, INC agronomists Bernabé Aguilar and Leandro Pérez de los Cobos made a surprising breakthrough. By wrapping the plot in a sheet of polyethylene film on a timber frame, they discovered, they could halt the wind and hold in heat. The result was a faster-growing and dramatically larger harvest.

Plastic greenhouses cover 40,000 hectares of land near Almería / Reuben J. Brown

It was the year Karl Ziegler won a Nobel prize for his innovations with polyethylene and Thomas Cronin filed the first patent for silicone breast implants. An age of plastic was dawning around the world, and in Almería its light was set to shine fiercely. By 1970, plastic covered 45 hectares in the region. Today, the figure is nearly one thousand times that. 

“We are proud because we built the greenhouses,” Gómez Ferrón told me. Her family — like many of the 14,000 families who own and operate greenhouses in the region — has gone from being illiterate subsistence farmers to university-educated agronomists in three generations.

A relentless drive for efficiency in Almería’s greenhouses has made the region home to some of the most productive agricultural land in the world / Reuben J. Brown

“To produce more quantity and more quality: this is my mission,” she told me, surrounded by nine-metre-long tomato vines woven through a grid of wires and columns, heavy with ripening fruit. “For every litre of water we use, every square meter of soil, we produce 15–22 more times tomatoes, peppers, vegetables than we would outside,” she claimed, detailing the advancements she and her generation of greenhouse growers have made to improve production and taste. The switch from chemical pesticides to a complex menu of insect-based solutions including parasitic wasps and predatory mites that arrive in small plastic bottles containing thousands of specimens; the introduction of computer-controlled aquaponics to cut water use; composting old plant stems to produce new soil; adding UV filtration to the plastic sheets to stop bad insects getting in, and planting flowering shrubs between her pepper plants so there’s pollen available in the winter for the good ones.

“Outside is a horrible landscape,” Gómez Ferrón admitted, before a glint crossed her bright blue eyes. “But inside is a rainforest: it’s an Amazonian project under plastic.”

"It’s an Amazonian project under plastic," Lola Gómez Ferrón says of the Almería model / Reuben J. Brown

It was almost dizzying to understand the degree of control and refinement that goes into an intensification in productivity of this order: to win a continuous battle over scarcity to produce astonishing abundance. At one point in our tour, Gómez Ferrón picked up a yellow box of bumblebees she uses to pollinate her vines. The bees are native to Almería but are cultivated 2000km away in a warehouse in the Netherlands used exclusively for this species of bee. Next door is another warehouse used for a species specific to the Canary Islands. Owing to a pest-control additive in the plastic sheets that blocks UV light, the bees can’t see very well in the greenhouses, so electric “UV lighthouses” have been installed near their hives so they know where to return to. When she opened the lid, and the bees writhed around with a buzzing ferocity I’d not heard before. Sorry vegans, I thought, even your tomatoes require animal suffering. 

Gómez Ferrón was never placid on my tour of Clisol. Her bright eyes and curled, bobbing hair expressed an excitement and pride that sometimes grew into bitterness, as if her work was being misunderstood. She described with agitation the activists, influencers, chefs, and Eurocrats who insisted that her way of farming was unnatural and unacceptable. They say “‘you need to eat only seasonal vegetables.’ Only seasonal vegetables — What!? For 62 years, our system for producing vegetables has been in winter — for 500 million people in the European community. Whether these vegetables, tomatoes, cucumber, zucchini, aubergine and peppers, are more artificial or more natural, this is your opinion.” 

Almería’s fruit and vegetables are exported to Europe and beyond year-round / Reuben J. Brown#

Despite the obvious costs of her system — the mountains of plastic waste, the factory-farmed bees, the exploited migrant workers — this was the part of Gómez Ferrón’s posture I found the least disagreeable. By the criticism she was complaining against, the whole enterprise of agriculture is “unnatural”: a manipulation of the earth’s natural processes towards human gain. How can one say zucchinis have a natural “season” when they were first bred in Europe in the late 19th century? A world of eight billion people relies on miracles of agriculture like Almería’s: a whirring hybrid of machine and nature, ticking away under a sea of plastic blanketing a desert land whose value to human life was otherwise marginal. 

And yet, no matter how efficient such a system is made, its sheer intensity creates damage outside of its control; and it rests on resources that — no matter how many growers wish otherwise — ultimately remain finite. 

Two days before my visit to Clisol, I’d taken a walk at the beach at Balanegra, at the west of the Plastic Sea. About 30 centimetres from the top of the low cliffside, a torrent of plastic greenhouse sheeting cascaded towards the beach: huge bundles of polyethylene belching from the ground in sickly shades of ivory white and greenish pink. On the shingle below, blue and yellow pest-control traps, polystyrene beehive inserts, hosepipes and plastic bottles were gradually being drawn into the sea. 

Plastic disposal and recycling systems have improved in recent decades, but dumping sites like this abound in Almería / Reuben J. Brown

While resilient enough to contaminate landscapes like this for decades, on the greenhouses, plastic sheeting only lasts three years before fraying and losing its key properties. 50,000 tonnes of plastic waste are drawn out of the Almería’s greenhouses each year, all of it replaced by new virgin material. And though much of the used plastic now enters official waste and recycling streams, dumps like the one at Balanegra are found across Almería province, beside roads, in watercourses, and on hilltops far from greenhouse production.

Environmental and labour activists in Almería – including Joanna Morena, a representative for SOC-SAT, an agriculture labour union – expressed concerns to me that the plastic dust from these deteriorating dumps is being drawn up into the produce grown in the greenhouses, and absorbed into people’s bodies. In 2021, a study published in Environmental Pollution found “a clear relationship between the development of the greenhouse industry in Almería and the concentration of microplastics” in the region’s soil and sea grasses as early as the 1970s.

The Sotrafa manufacturing plant, near the centre of the Plastic Sea, produces much of the agricultural plastic used on the region’s greenhouses / Reuben J. Brown

Research into the potential health effects of this problem remains at its early stages. But as Matthew Campen, a toxicologist whose recent study found an average of seven grams of plastic in a sample of 24 human brains, told the New York Times recently: “I don’t think I’ve talked to a single person who’s said: ‘Fantastic! Love to know that there’s all that plastic in my brain.’” Perhaps most alarmingly for produce from Almería, microplastics and nanoplastics found in human organs in the study “primarily consist of polyethylene”, the same plastic used to cover the greenhouses, before it is left to gradually diffuse into the environment. 

When I asked Lola Gómez Ferrón for her view on this problem, she was quick to shift blame for microplastic pollution to the clothing industry, and said that “the problem for me is not the material: it is a wonderful material,” insisting that what happens after the plastic’s useful life is what matters, and that disposal has dramatically improved since her parents’ generation. “My father and mother, they’d take the old plastic, put it outside, and burn it,” she told me. Though it is hidden behind layers of official process, this is still largely the fate of Almería’s agricultural plastic today: in 2018, more than 43 per cent of the region’s waste was burnt to produce electricity, marginally more than was recycled — and even then only into lower-grade polymers. But Gómez Ferrón insisted that she had “zero apologies” for using it to grow crops, when the increase in output was so extraordinary, and impossible to produce without plastic.

All 40,000 hectares of greenhouse plastic must be replaced every three years / Reuben J. Brown

As well as slowing evaporation and halting the destructive winds, there was one more ingredient needed for an agricultural explosion at the edge of Europe’s only desert: water. In the 1940s, Franco’s government found it underground, in hundreds of square kilometres of aquifers under the Campo de Dalías, charged over centuries by rainfall from the Sierra de Gador mountains. To supply the INC’s agricultural experiments in the 1950s, a series of boreholes was drilled into the aquifers, and by the year the first plastic greenhouse delivered a crop, extractions had reached 30 million cubic metres. 

From the very beginning, this was founded on a kind of false economy. After warnings of overexploitation were ignored and ignored again from the 1980s onwards (at 140 million cubic metres annually, extractions today outstrip the replenishment rate by three to one), the region looked towards desalinating sea water to help irrigate the greenhouses. In Spain’s 2004 “Agua Plan”, five desalination plants were promised for the Almería, though so far only two have been delivered.

One of Europe’s largest desalination plants, Desaladora Campo de Dalías supplies irrigation water at fifty times the price of groundwater / Reuben J. Brown

One of these plants is found above the plastic sheets spewing from the cliff at Balanegra. The plastic is all that remains of greenhouses removed in the early 2000s to make way for the Desaladora Campo Dalías, one of the largest desalination facilities in Europe. Each day here, 220,000 cubic metres of seawater is separated into 100,000 cubic metres of drinking water and 120,000 cubic metres  of hyper-salinated brine pumped back into the Mediterranean. The fresh water is pumped uphill to a tank 310 metres above sea level, and then distributed eastwards across the Plastic Sea. But even this was only enough to meet at most 20 per cent of the region’s demand, and the cost to growers is astonishing: one euro per cubic metre, or fifty times the price of the finite groundwater. 

The picture appears increasingly bleak, and — to some — threatens the Almería model wholesale. As a 2020 University of Almería study concluded, the use of irrigation water in the region “is not sustainable … and could collapse the production system.” Thousands of harvests could be ruined, just like those lost to wind before the 1960s. 

Though sulphate-based pesticides were largely phased out in the 2000s, some farmers still use them due to their lower cost / Reuben J. Brown

While capital-intensive greenhouses like Lola Gómez Ferrón’s might be able to absorb the increased cost of desalinated water, not every greenhouse in Almería is like Clisol. A few days after my visit there I toured a cluster of greenhouses west of the Plastic Sea near Castell De Ferro, where  feral cats slipped between the fraying plastic sheets and piles of discarded produce littered the roadside — too curvy or off-colour to be sold. I was joined by Javi and Fran, two greenhouse owners, and Michael, a local English expat who used to grow wine in the valley before most of his vines perished to drought. These were “mom and pop” operations, Michael said, and had been little changed in decades. In one greenhouse, a Romanian woman called Viorica was harvesting cherry tomatoes coated in a thin white film of ammonium sulphate – the chemical pesticide that Gómez Ferrón had assured me was universally phased out in the 2000s in favour of insect-based solutions.

Here, there was little of the teleological thrust of my tour of Clisol, more a sense of fragility or decline. Javi and Fran have seen their margins fall and fall in recent years, as growing international competition has capped the prices they can charge, while inflation has forced up their costs. “Before, a family could live well with 500 square metres of greenhouses.” Javi lamented. “Now you need ten times that, because the margins are so tight.”

Profit margins from greenhouse agriculture have been shrinking for many family owners — Fran supplements his income building houses / Reuben J. Brown

The growers here were also more up front about their relationship with migrant labour. “It’s as if everyone from Morocco and Sub-Saharan Africa came here to work.” Javi said, in Spanish. (He later described the seasonal workers he employs as “Moros”, or Moors). “They’re quite happy to employ them,” Michael commented, but “they don’t like to see them in the streets; they don’t like to see them in the hospital, the doctors’ rooms, medical centres.” 

I was reminded of a conversation I’d had off to the side of the hubbub at the eviction in Cortijo el Uno. “It’s the chain of exploitation,” Joanna Morena, the SOC-SAT union representative told me. “The farmer is exploited, so he’s going to exploit the worker. Because of course, there are also farmers who earn little, who aren’t rich. Why? Because the production system is always looking for the benefits. They never see the cost.” 

Cortijo el Uno was home to many children, but without a place to stay their school places are in jeopardy / Reuben J. Brown

We were talking in a Spanish-inflected Franglais and I told her I might call these “unpriced externalities” — the hidden costs of production paid not by the end consumer but by human and environmental damage and exploitation. “Eh,” she said, “I know how to say the ostrich policy!” I must have looked confused, because she flipped her head down between her knees as if burying it in the sand. We laughed. 

But when an ostrich bends its neck it’s usually tending to its nest, turning its eggs: Almería’s farmers and politicians weren’t just hiding from the costs of their work; they were trying to maintain their livelihoods — and so were the consumers eating their food.  

At late afternoon, migrant workers make their way home from a shift harvesting vegetables / Reuben J. Brown

From what I can glean from the coded markings on supermarket wrappers, I’ve eaten 18 tomatoes, two cucumbers, four courgettes and three bell peppers from Almería since I returned to London two months ago. I’ve eaten just as much, if not more, from Morocco: where the Almerían model has been replicated in places as far south as Guelmim, a town with annual rainfall of just 130mm. I’m a young writer renting in one of the world’s most expensive cities, and Morocco’s laxer regulation and even lower labour costs make for cherry tomatoes that cost half as much in my local shops. As strong as my concerns may be about the human and environmental costs of my food and the nanoplastics it may contain, the financial impact wins out. 

In The Atlantic in December, Elizabeth Rush wrote from Bogotá, Colombia, on how the city had begun rationing water to tackle a drought. One day out of every ten, 10 per cent of the city went without water. What I found extraordinary about her story was how the rationing served to collectivise a problem of scarcity that would otherwise have been felt individually. Globalisation has been oriented towards providing resources at the point of individual consumption: each link of exchange, energy, and labour required to get them there connected by its own productive logic, but not by responsibility to the health of the chain as a whole. Before I reported this story, it was rare for me to question how the tomatoes I was buying in January had arrived in a supermarket in London. In Bogotá, this had been flipped: the rolling rationing “generates, if not solidarity exactly, a feeling of mutual inconvenience,” Rush wrote. “In our community WhatsApp chat, residents remind one another when our turn for rationing draws near. I fill up containers and deposit them throughout the house: a bucket in each of the bathrooms and a huge stockpot in the kitchen. I’m careful not to exceed what I think we will need to get by.”

Since I’ve returned from Almería, I’ve been thinking about what a similar collectivisation of responsibility might mean for this system of agriculture: whether all its actors — the growers, labourers, water utilities, co-operatives, supermarkets, and even end consumers — can be led to understand that we need this system to continue; and that it can’t continue as it is. 

Cart rails and aquaponic systems are some of the infrastructural investments Clisol has made to improve productivity / Reuben J. Brown

As I stood in the indoor rainforest of Gómez Ferrón’s greenhouse, breathing decarbonised air and grazing from vines weighed heavy by boughs of surprisingly delicious black tomatoes, I realised that she was presenting to me a sort of solarpunk rendition of Eden, in which the streams and plants and animals had been brought forth by human ingenuity and technology. Outside this garden, underpaid migrant workers were sleeping in unsafe settlements, plastic dust was leaching into the soil, and finite groundwater was being steadily drawn down.

What would it take, I thought, for us to eat the fruit of knowledge and step outside the garden? As in Bogotá, this felt unlikely unless it was forced by something beyond the system’s control — some foreseeable consequence left perpetually unforeseen. Perhaps when the aquifer runs dry, or when a medical study reveals the terrible health impacts of polyethylene in our food. Some in Almería have been warning of abandonment recently: “If you don’t have water, everybody moves away,” University of Almería geology professor José María Calaforra has said. The costs could ratchet up, the growers be forced out, and a gleaming mat of plastic left to slowly decay under the semi-desert sun. 

As I bit into the flesh of another black tomato, it struck me that this would be its own kind of eviction.

The remains of an abandoned greenhouse in the Tabernas Desert / Reuben J. Brown