Paper short abstract:

This communication explores olive harvesting practices and olive oil production. Based on ongoing ethnographic work in southern Spain, this papers examines how current olive food system contributes to making some humans more vulnerable than others, and why this impacts women disproportionately.

Paper long abstract:

Andalusians of Jaén,

proud olive pickers,

tell me from your soul: who,

who raised the olive trees?

They were not raised by nothing,

nor by money, nor by the master,

but by the silent earth,

by work and by sweat.

In these famous verses, which are the official anthem of Jaén province in Andalusia, Miguel Hernandez asks the “proud olive pickers” to answer this question: “Who raised the olive trees?” For this paper, I will ask the ensuing question: "who picks them today?"

From an anthropological perspective rooted in gender studies, this communication explores agricultural and agri-food practices around olive oil production, especially during harvest season. This moment is when this system can be seen as a "synthesis of field and factory," as Sidney W. Mintz defines plantation.

This paper is based on ongoing ethnographic work in southern Spain and aims to understand how contemporary olive oil “food system” contributes to making some humans more vulnerable than others, particularly according to gender.

Following Donna Haraway’s idea that plantation is "the discipline of plants in particular, and the discipline of humans to work on those", I first explore the modeling of land and landscape for olive growing purposes. I then analyse more extensively the social aspects of work organization in cultivating, harvesting and processing olives, with an emphasis on gender inequalities. Finally I will evoke ongoing local struggles and avenues of hope that arose during my fieldwork.

Paper short abstract:

Sandy SW Portugal became a plantationscape of plastic-walled greenhouses that produce berries for Northern Europe, largely supported on the massive input of Asian migrant workers. In this paper we will address the new plantations through the angle of labor migration in this ethnographic setting.

Paper long abstract:

In the historically neglected region of Odemira, Alentejo, SW Portugal, a combination of political, financial and environmental factors propitiated a radical transformation of the sandy and rocky landscape into a quasi-continuum of greenhouses where berries and other fruits and vegetables are produced for international markets under the sponsorship of international corporations, at the expense of local water and weather, and with a massive input of imported labor. In this contemporary plantationscape, labor is imported mostly from Asia through a number of migratory channels. What used to be a region of abandonment and demographic decline is now the temporary home for a variety of groups, from eastern Europe, Africa, and above all South Asia. Based on the current immersive research of Kishor Limbu with fellow Nepalese workers, we will analyze the ways in which Nepalese migrants in and out of the berry greenhouses negotiate their itineraries, legal status, and expectations of social mobility in the European Union, while also outlining the changes, tensions, COVID-related crises and political management of a new social and ethnic population in the Alentejo.

Paper short abstract:

The paper analyses the creation of the socially constructed imagined figure of "The Entrepreneur Returning Migrant" as part of the implementation of Migration as Development agenda in Thailand and its role in creating disciplined labor force to the Israeli exploitative agriculture sector.

Paper long abstract:

The paper focuses on a socially constructed imagined human type I name as the figure of "The Entrepreneur Returning Migrant". The figure was constructed around the migration from Isaan region in Thailand to Israel to work as farmworkers in the exploitive agriculture sector for the past four decades. The figure represents the construction of the ideal returning male migrant from Israel as an expert in agriculture and potential entrepreneur, capable of accomplishing upwards mobility through knowledge and skills acquired in Israel, as part of the neoliberal agenda of Migration as Development (MAD). The paper specifically explores the history of the agriculture development aid projects of Israel in Thailand and its effect on the development of the Thai rolling elite imagination of Israel as a source of innovation and advanced agricultural techniques. I argue that the figure plays a role in creating a discipline Thai workforce to the Israeli labor market, based on practices of othering, discrimination, and control. The paper examines how returning migrants understand and experience MAD by discussing notions of success, failure and exclusionary structures and practices in Thailand. The paper is based on multi-scalar ethnography done with people from Ban Phak Khad, a sending migration village community in Issan, together with archival research and media and cultural productions content analysis. The analysis is also based on materials from what I identify as the "Translocal Vernacular Migration Archive" (TVMA), a collection of cultural and material productions created and curated by migrants around the experiences of migration to Israel.

Paper short abstract:

In the constantly transforming land and water-scape of the Scheldt’s estuary, recent changes in water management are re-shuffling the entanglement of land, water, humans, non-humans and capital. This paper builds on fieldwork in grazing pastures to reflect on uprooted commons.

Paper long abstract:

Polderization – the process of draining, enclosing and claiming tidal and/or coastal land – has been ongoing for nearly a thousand years in the estuary of the Scheldt, allowing humans to settle and farm on ground previously occupied by water and marshes. After WW2 this process developed exponentially and most of the regions’ wetlands were drained to give further room for mechanized agriculture. Locally-elected water boards, mostly constituted of land-owning farmers, manage the region’s commoned drainage network (c.f. Ingold, 2017) to maintain land suitable for agriculture. Severe flooding in the late twentieth century followed by a growing awareness of the threat of rising sea levels then led to a shift towards ‘giving more room to the river and its nature’ (c.f. Goeldner-Gianella, 2007), reclaiming agricultural lands for the river. This shift has been strongly backed by the Port of Antwerp as it enables its expansion (Zitouni, 2020). Furthermore, severe droughts in recent years have accelerated the restructuring of farmers’ commoned water management network moving it into the hands of a centralised bureaucracy.

In this constantly transforming land and water-scape, this paper focuses on dairy farm pastures as sites of production of the plantationocene. Based on long-term anthropological fieldwork, it will present an ethnography of the hydro-social and extractive cycles that produce these pastures. As the entanglements and co-production of land, water, humans, non-humans and capital transform to meet new societal priorities, this site of ongoing land reclamation provides a nuanced case of uprooted commons.

Paper short abstract:

Based on a case study of the intensive agriculture in Murcia (Spain), this paper examines the role of agricultural standards on the construction and representation of environment.

Paper long abstract:

The 2016 phytoplankton bloom in the Mar Menor lagoon (Murcia, Spain), as the final episode of a long process of eutrophication, and the appearance of thousands of dead fish on the shore in 2019 made visible one of the most important national ecological disasters of the last decades. The scope of these events brought into the public sphere the debate on the effectiveness of public and private regulations that protect the lagoon and control the environmental impact of agricultural activity. The Mar Menor lagoon is a strategic socio-environmental enclave to analyze, on the one hand, the impact of intensive agriculture on human and extra-human nature (Moore, 2020) and, on the other hand, the role of private standards of quality, safety and sustainability in the control of environmental pollution. This communication argues that standards are based on an abstract and instrumental representation of Nature that separates agricultural practices from their effects on the territory and landscape. In a context of strong socio-environmental tensions and conflicts and in the framework of a complex and hybrid regulatory space, we show how the intensive application of quality standards play a key role in the construction of the environment. The research is based on a methodological strategy that combines the analysis of secondary data (statistical sources, documentary analysis of public and private standards) with in-depth interviews with representative actors of the institutional network of standards and the main associations of local producers and irrigation communities.