Colonial legacies of the greenhouse agroindustry in Spain

Loreto Garcia Saiz, UC3M

2025

The ecosocial crisis is intensifying across multiple dimensions: environmental degradation, economic precarization, social inequality, housing shortages, and health emergencies, among others. These are the consequences of an economic model that, over the last century, has operated on the assumption of limitless growth, largely decoupled from the biophysical and social limits of the planet. As ecofeminist scholar Yayo Herrero observes, the availability of fossil energy and technoscientific innovation — within a patriarchal framework — allowed Western societies to “float above and outside the web of life”, creating the illusion of material and ecological detachment.

This illusion has been especially visible in the agroindustrial sector, where landscapes and natural resources have been radically transformed to maximize production. Agricultural systems, supported by an underlying narrative of progress and modernization, have long operated under extractive logics that treat nature and labor as endlessly exploitable. These extractive practices are not accidental: they are embedded within broader histories of capitalist expansion and colonial extraction.

A striking example of this is the so-called Sea of Plastic in southeastern Spain — a landscape of over 300 square kilometers of plastic-covered greenhouses, located in the province of Almería. Every year, the region produces approximately four million tons of fruits and vegetables, of which more than 70% are exported, mainly to Germany, France, and the United Kingdom. Spain ranks among the top four horticultural exporters worldwide, after China, the United States, and sometimes the Netherlands. Although not strictly a monoculture, the Sea of Plastic focuses predominantly on four crops: tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, and melons. This agricultural cluster is often described as “Europe’s vegetable garden,” a key supplier of off-season produce during winter months when Central and Northern European production is dormant.

Behind this remarkable productivity lies a social-ecological system deeply marked by inequality and unsustainability. Two central, often invisibilized factors sustain the agroindustrial model: cheap labor, primarily from migrant workers, many of whom come from Morocco and other African countries, working under precarious exploitative conditions; and cheap water, drawn from ancient underground aquifers, now heavily overexploited and contaminated with nitrates.

Political ecology scholarship has long demonstrated how capitalist accumulation depends on reducing, displacing, or externalizing social and ecological costs. Capitalist systems succeed not because they pay the full cost of production, but because they evade it — often through exploitation, devaluation, or outright nonpayment.

In Almería, these dynamics are particularly stark. The region’s desertic climate, characterized by the near absence of surface water, means that its agricultural system relies almost entirely on “fossil water” — ancient aquifer reserves accumulated over millennia, replenished only partially by snowmelt from the Sierra Nevada mountains. In effect, an arid landscape exports massive volumes of embedded water — in the form of vegetables — to wealthier European countries, using cheap migrant labor to sustain production. This geographic, extractive, and colonial matrix becomes clear when placed in its historical and geopolitical context.

Historical Origins: Francoist Internal Colonization

The roots of Almería’s agroindustrial system stretch back to the post–Spanish Civil War period. In 1939, one of the Franco regime’s first institutional initiatives was the creation of the National Institute of Colonization (INC), which became the central agency for agrarian policy. The INC drew on longstanding “hydraulic utopia” ideals within Spanish regenerationist thought, aiming to rationalize and modernize rural landscapes by transforming marginal or arid lands into productive agricultural zones through irrigation and engineering.

According to Ortega and Gomez, the regime sought to increase cultivated land, aligned with its autarkic economic model, and to carry out a techno-natural transformation of Spanish territory, redistributing water and resources from wetter regions to the arid south and southeast. This internal colonization initiative sought to address several postwar challenges: widespread rural poverty, underdevelopment, social unrest, and a lingering sense of imperial decline following the loss of Spain’s overseas colonies in 1898.

In Almería, the absence of rivers or major water bodies meant that agricultural expansion had to rely on drilling underground aquifers rather than building dams or canals. Three key innovations enabled the rise of the greenhouse model: well-drilling and irrigation networks to access fossil water reserves; settler labor drawn from internal colonization programs, resettling populations into newly established agricultural zones; sand mulching (enarenado) combined with plastic greenhouse covers to reduce evaporation and protect crops from harsh winds, enabling rapid harvest cycles.

While these innovations laid the groundwork, it was Spain’s economic liberalization in the 1960s — part of a broader developmentalist shift — that accelerated the expansion of greenhouse agriculture. By intensifying inputs of water, labor, sand, and agrochemicals, the Sea of Plastic achieved up to three harvest cycles per year, providing a major competitive advantage in European markets.

The 1980s and 1990s marked a period of consolidation. The production calendar lengthened, auxiliary industries (plastics, packaging, logistics) expanded, and foreign agribusiness interests increased their presence. Spain’s accession to the European Union in 1986 facilitated the integration of Almería’s produce into European supply chains, stimulating further intensification — even as regional aquifers were formally declared overexploited by the Andalusian government in the mid-1980s.

Ph. Loreto Garcia Saiz

Labor Transformations and Neocolonial Dynamics

Until the late 1970s, the majority of agricultural labor came from local settler families (colonos), including women and children. As the sector industrialized and early settler families accumulated wealth, the labor model shifted: women withdrew from greenhouse work to focus on domestic tasks, and many young people sought employment in higher-paying sectors. The resulting labor gap was increasingly filled by foreign workers. From the 1980s onward, the demand for seasonal, low-wage labor intensified, attracting migrants from North Africa, especially Morocco. Today, thousands of migrant workers form the backbone of the greenhouse industry, often under highly exploitative conditions marked by low pay, long hours, lack of labor protections, and inadequate housing.

These labor dynamics cannot be understood in isolation. They are embedded within broader geopolitical patterns that position Andalusia as part of Europe’s agricultural periphery, supplying cheap food to Northern European consumers while depending on cheap labor from the Global South. In this sense, the Sea of Plastic exemplifies a system of neocolonial continuity, reproducing historical patterns of resource extraction, labor exploitation, and ecological degradation.

The entanglement of water, labor, and capital in the Sea of Plastic thus reveals a set of relations that connect European consumption patterns to global inequalities. The landscape of plastic, fossil water, and migrant labor that stretches across southeastern Spain is a product of historical colonization processes, postwar internal colonization, and contemporary forms of transnational agribusiness — all underpinned by an economic logic that continues to externalize ecological and social costs in the name of productivity and growth.

Further readings and resources:

Duarte-Abadía, B., & Boelens, R. (2019). Colonizing rural waters: The politics of hydro-territorial transformation in the Guadalhorce Valley, Málaga, Spain. Water International, 44(2), 148-168.

Fernández-Cebrián, A. (2023). Fables of Development: Capitalism and Social Imaginaries in Spain (1950-1967). Liverpool University Press.

Herrero, Y. (2023). Toma de tierra: Apuntes para situar la vida en el centro. Caniche.

Ortega Cantero, N., & Gómez Mendoza, J. (1987). Geografía y Regeneracionismo en España (1875-1936). Sistema: revista de ciencias sociales, 77, 77-90.