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Paper short abstract

As food systems receive renewed attention amidst concerns about climate change, sustainability, and local livelihoods, this paper focuses on how Spain's “peripheral” agricultural zones emerge as key sites of transnational migration, European food production, and populist discontent.

Paper long abstract

In the summer of 2025, the hottest summer on record in Spain, anti-migration riots broke out in Torre Pacheco, in response to the beating of an elderly Spanish man. The beating had been attributed to migrants of North African descent, with right-wing populist groups such as Vox inflaming anti-immigration sentiments in the ensuing days. Rioters took it upon themselves to “hunt” for migrants in the town of 41,000 inhabitants (Forero 2025), of which over thirty percent are migrants, and many of them agricultural workers.

The province of Murcia, where Torre Pacheco is located, is often referred to as "la huerta de Europa [the orchard of Europe]” for its outsized role in the supply of fresh fruits and vegetables in the European food market. Murcia and other key agricultural zones such as Valencia and Andalucia attract new arrivals to Spain who do not have their documents in order and who often find agriculture to be the only sector where they can find employment. The work is dangerous, exploitative, and precarious, yet essential for the Spanish economy and the European food system.

As food systems receive renewed attention and urgency amidst concerns about climate change, sustainability & resilience, and local livelihoods—as seen in the European protests against the EU-Mercosur free trade agreement—this paper focuses on the agrofood industry in Spain and its rural agricultural zones to examine how Torre Pacheco and other towns previously understood as “peripheral” emerge as key sites of transnational migration, European food production, and populist discontent.