VIII
Water and Land are Worth More than (Red) Gold¹
By Ana Pinto and Nazaret Castro
By now, it has probably become clear that the prevailing agricultural model in Huelva – that of industrial and intensive red fruit farming using plastics and agrochemicals – shares more similarities with mining than with traditional agriculture. It is an extractive way of using the land. Fertility is extracted in the same way as minerals are extracted from mountains. In other words: much is taken from the land and nothing is given back, nor is the land allowed to replenish itself, because resting times are eliminated in a never-ending spiral moving at an unstoppable pace. That is not to say that the “traditional” agriculture mentioned here does not bring its own environmental problems. However, some of its characteristics – such as crop diversity, the practice of leaving land fallow, and the use of natural fertilisers, particularly the historical use of animal manure – mean that it has less of an impact on bodies and territories. Red fruit agriculture, on the other hand, is tremendously extractive and thus has a profound impact on human health, as well as on the integrity of ecosystems. The problem with agribusiness – or agricultural mining – is that, like traditional mining, it depletes resources and leaves behind a scorched land. In Latin America, where they know all about extractivism and the plundering of natural resources, it is posited that if mining – or agribusiness – were truly a source of wealth, then Bolivia would be a wealthy country, and Potosí a major hub of the global economy. In reality, the countries from which the most resources have been extracted over the last five centuries correspond with those which experience the greatest inequality and poverty. The Ecuadorian author Alberto Acosta called it “the curse of abundance”. The countries or regions richest in natural resources – in sources of life – are precisely those that have suffered most keenly from the extractive dynamics of the capitalist system. This system, with its aspiration to infinite economic growth, has a constant requirement for cheap raw materials. These regions have, therefore, been subjected to the most severe levels of plundering and oppression. They have been turned into “enclave economies” at the service of the “core” countries, which have secured their central position through the bloody conquest of the territories of the Global South. And thus the richest countries in material terms – rich in water, in soil fertility, in minerals – have become the poorest, for the benefit of others.2
When we speak of “enclave economies”, we mean that the economy of one territory is devoted to the economic benefit of another. These are economies that destroy both human and non-human life. We would describe Huelva as functioning as an enclave economy, not solely because of its agribusiness, but also due to the presence of other equally highly polluting sectors such as metal mining and Huelva’s Chemical Park (also known as the Chemical Pole). This is why we shall employ an expression widely used by the extractivist resistance movements against the model in Latin America, when they describe the territories they defend as “sacrifice zones”. In other words, these places have been sacrificed to the altar of progress, of capital, of “development”.
There is a need to propose alternative – territory-based – ways of thinking about what our resources are worth. This is in order to challenge the values that capitalist economy places on natural resources and its needs to plunder territories to incorporate their resources into global production chains. In Latin America, water is said to be worth more than gold; underscoring the fact that mining requires enormous quantities of water. But there are clear parallels here with agricultural mining and other extractive activities. One example is hydropower, which, by channelling rivers to build large dams, modifies their courses, seriously impacting the water regime – the water cycles that ensure natural precipitation patterns. Water, the most vital element for any form of life, is worth more than gold – than any version of gold. It is also worth more than “red gold”, as strawberries, raspberries and blueberries are sometimes known. In the province of Huelva, “red gold” signifies the promise of employment, development and “progress”. As is the case in Latin America, and in any of the capitalist economy’s “enclaves”, Huelva is an impoverished territory with high unemployment rates. Consequently, any economic initiative that emerges in this context is met with enthusiasm given its promise of generating wealth for all. It thus attracts the support of politicians and trade unions. It is difficult to oppose one of the few opportunities for employment and investment in a province like this, even if the promised employment will be precarious, and the investment could ultimately lead to disaster for the entire population.
But this is development for what and for whom? Why is cultivating the land with high-tech tractors, genetically modified seeds, and poisonous pesticides to be seen as progress? When were we convinced that gold is worth more than water and that what they have called “development” is a goal to be achieved at any cost? Who – and based on what criteria – decides what land is worth, what water is worth, and what gold is worth?
The red fruit industry is drying up Doñana
As we write these pages, the difficult crossroads that agribusiness in Huelva has brought us to with regard to water is more evident than ever. The problem goes back a long way. The more than 11,000 hectares dedicated to strawberry and red fruit cultivation require an enormous amount of irrigation. The water for this is taken from the same aquifers that feed the marshes. The strawberry industry is concentrated in the area close to the natural park, in municipalities such as Almonte, Palos de la Frontera, Lucena del Puerto and Moguer. For years now, both environmental organisations and experts have been warning of the risks that overexploitation of the aquifers would pose to the marshes. Today, there is little doubt about this: according to the Guadalquivir Hydrographic Confederation (CHG), three of the five bodies of groundwater that feed the natural park “are suboptimal in terms of quantity”.3
The Spanish state was reprimanded by Unesco in 2020 and the European Court of Justice in 2021 for failing to put an end to illegal irrigation. In 2014, an environmental impact study of irrigated areas4 estimated that there were 2,500 wells in the region, at least 800 of which were illegal. That same year, the CSIC determined that there were symptoms of Doñana “drying out”.5 Hence the need for the 2014 Plan de la Corona Forestal (known as the Strawberry Plan), which sought to regulate the cultivation of crops north of the wetland. Some 400 illegal wells were indeed sealed, however, that amounts to less than half. And the future does not look rosy. The Andalusian government has already expressed its intention to regularise illegal irrigation, an initiative put on hold at the time due to the imminent Andalusian elections on 19 June 2022.
The problem is that the region has now become highly dependent on the strawberry industry, which accounts for 8% of Andalusia’s GDP, according to the Interfresa employers’ organisation. The accelerated expansion of strawberry production in the region has been strongly encouraged by the public authorities. It seems they have not stopped to consider the medium and long term socioenvironmental consequences of the model. In Huelva, as in Murcia and Almeria, they have opted for a production model that is highly intensive in water use. Water is not in surplus in these provinces. This was explained by Felipe Fuentelsaz, agriculture coordinator for the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) at the 1st International Day of Reflection on Huelva’s agricultural environment, held in Huelva on 7 April 2022:
We are doing things the wrong way round: fruit and vegetable growing has been encouraged, when this
activity is water-intensive and we don’t have this natural resource. We have changed the production
model, moving from small family farming to the industrial model, and the authorities have backed it
without considering the environmental implications
Water is worth more than gold, but we persist in plundering aquifers as if they were an infinite resource, while at the same time the human right to water is being denied to many. In Huelva, several thousand people live in shanty towns and, in addition to the many other rights that are denied to them, they have no access to drinking water. The vast majority of these people are foreign nationals without regularised residency status, and many of them work in the strawberry fields. This demonstrates once again that social and environmental issues are not distinct – much less antagonistic – issues. Rather, they are two sides of the same coin belonging to a model that is inflicting devastating harm on bodies and territories. Proof of this connection is further substantiated by the prevalence of revolving doors at the level of the social elite. Juan Antonio Millán, former PSOE mayor of Cartaya and one of the main promoters of contracting at source, has chaired the COREHU (Comunidades de Regantes de Huelva) landowners’ association since 2021. The agro-industrial model requires the appropriation of livelihoods and the overexploitation of labour.
A future of permanent water crisis
In reality, issues with water are common to many agribusiness-related environmental conflicts. We have seen this in countries such as Guatemala and Colombia, where entire communities are undergoing a serious water crisis due to sugar cane or palm oil plantations. This means to say that they have been left without something as basic as drinking water, because the natural sources from which they were supplied have dried up through the intensive irrigation of monoculture crops, and any remaining water sources have been contaminated by the agrochemicals applied to those crops. We have not as of yet reached a comparable situation in Huelva. What is currently at stake is the Doñana ecosystem. And yet, despite its tremendous value, it is still regarded by many people as something remote, of concern exclusively to that peculiar species of “ecologists”. However, the wellbeing of our ecosystems does not only have an affect on the ability of birds to continue migrating and roosting in our territory. In the medium and long term, if we drain our aquifers and ruin our ecosystems, we will alter the water cycles, and find ourselves doomed to a future characterised by extreme heat and thirst.
We have been noticing increasingly intense droughts for years. This is not a cyclical phenomenon, it is structural. The climate in Spain is changing and we saw this more clearly than ever last summer. While fire devoured vast areas, the spectre of water shortages and rationing once again loomed over our heads. The beginning of September brought the news that the last permanent lagoon in Doñana was gone. This is not just a matter of negligence. Various studies had been warning of this risk for three decades. Meanwhile, the president of the Andalusian regional government, Juanma Moreno, made controversial statements in defence of golf courses. These are strange priorities indeed on the part of our leader.
Continuing to deplete our aquifers is fully-fledged collective suicide carried out on a daily basis thanks to the greed of a few businessmen, the connivance of the bulk of the political class, the media’s complicit silence, and the lack of interest from a large part of the public. In the wake of the Mar Menor disaster, which no expert hesitates to link to intensive and large-scale agriculture, putting an end to this destructive economic model predicated on the notion of feast today, famine tomorrow should be a priority. It is as urgent as it is vital.
The disconnect between needs and resources
Analysing what is happening with water in Huelva also allows us to understand the extent to which the red fruit agro-industry is a production model that does not align with local needs and resources. Firstly, it is disconnected from local needs because it is produced for export, especially to northern European countries. The Spanish state, however, imports a large part of the food we consume, including foods as common in our diet and our traditional agriculture as chickpeas. Some 90% of this traditional legume is imported from countries such as Mexico, Canada, and the United States. This is in spite of the fact that it is a crop that requires little water and is much more suited to our ecosystems than strawberries, raspberries or blueberries. This is the kind of absurdity which occurs when agriculture is put at the service of international markets rather than the nutritional needs of the local population.
Secondly, there is a disconnect between the red fruit agro-industry and the resources in our territory. We import cheap labour thanks to colonialism and immigration laws, although, as stated earlier, this is not because the local population does not want to work in the fields. It is because the conditions are so substandard that for employers to continue offering such low wages, they have to bring in people from outside who have no alternative but to accept such precarious conditions. Meanwhile, we utilise natural resources which are not abundant here, such as water. In a droughtprone country such as Spain, where the scientific community has long been warning that the situation is only set to worsen, what sense is there in planting large areas of the country with monocultural crops that require intensive irrigation and do not even serve the purpose of feeding the local population? By exporting strawberries, we are exporting water, which is something we cannot afford.
In short, we use water that we do not have and we import a workforce that we mistreat in order to export the strawberries demanded by middle-class European consumers. This is why we call Huelva a sacrifice zone. There are numerous other reasons, including the mines, the phosphogypsum deposits, the rates of cancer – not coincidentally one of the highest in Europe. Sacrifices always take place before an altar: one thing is sacrificed so that another can remain sacred. The sacrifice of Doñana and our territories, as well as that of the labourers, whatever their country of origin, is made before the altar of the gods of the modern world; the ideal of progress; the infinite growth of the economy measured in terms of gross domestic product; the law of merchandise, which is the law of capital.
With all this in mind, how can it be that the Andalusian government is committed to regularising the illegal irrigation schemes that are drying up Doñana? It is probably because, in the words of Felipe Fuentelsaz, “it is in the short term where the economic and political profitability lies” as well as because of the strawberry industry’s enormous lobbying power. What is beyond belief is that, with what is happening, with a drought that is most probably structural rather than cyclical, we continue to sacrifice the present of many and the future of all for a handful of euros which, as we have seen, do not even provide decent employment.
The health of body-territories
To reach an understanding of how what has led to such an absurd situation and waste of resources would require lengthy explanations and arguments that would fill another book. We believe, however, that there are deep-seated cultural issues at the root of the problem. Our civilisation is based on certain ideas that are deeply rooted in our psyche. One of these is the belief that man is separate from nature. There are two basic errors here. The first is that “man”, the male gender, was seen as representative of humanity as a whole. We read “man” and do not know whether we women, trans and non binary people are included in that term. The idea of “woman” was built on the inferiority or negation of the masculine and, therefore, of the human – closer to nature than to the social sphere. And that idea persists in the depths of our psyche, even though it has been profoundly questioned by feminist and LGBTQI+ movements.
The second misconception is that humanity is separate from nature: that nature and society are opposed to each other. “Man” has defined himself in contrast to other beings. Clutching sophisticated tools and technologies, he has lived under the delusion that he can disconnect himself from natural cycles. The disregard of the body in favour of “reason” – of the mental over the physical – has been deeply embedded in philosophy and politics at least since classical Greece. However, this took a turn for the worse with the processes of urbanisation and the invention of electricity, when societies became detached from agricultural activity and natural biorhythms. It was at that moment that we all began to live as if we could do without each other; as if we did not need the complex and vulnerable ecosystems that surround us; as if we were not interdependent and eco-dependent. We began to live as if our lives did not always ultimately depend on the care of other people and the health of body-territories.
The expression body-territory has been used by anti-extractivist and ecofeminist movements in Latin America to remind us that bodies are not distinct entities from the territories they inhabit. In other words, if the territory gets sick, the bodies that live there sicken, too. This is evident in the Huelva strawberry fields, where our bodies have also felt the consequences of the effects on the soil of the use and abuse of pesticides and chemical fertilisers. These consequences affect the bodies of the people who pick the fruit foremost, but those who eat it are affected, too. In fact, strawberries are known to be among the products that retain the most toxic substances from industrial agrochemicals. On 10 September 2020, a news item was published reporting the theft of “500 kilos of unripe mangoes, which had last been treated on 8 September with a fruit fly insecticide that is highly toxic to humans if consumed within 15 days of it being applied”.6
We included the news on our Facebook profile with the following comment:
Exploitation of workers in most of the sector + exploitation and depletion of ecosystems + pesticides that are
poisons: this is how the food agribusiness works and we see the results. Poverty and lack of resources for day
labourers, depletion of water resources, destruction and pollution of the natural environment and ever more new
food-borne diseases and allergies. Worst of all, many of these treatments on many farms are carried out while
people are working next to them and without protection. This is our own experience.
It is not uncommon to hear of co-workers in strawberry or peach fields suffering from allergies or asthma, which they relate to the use of pesticides. Often, the workers who apply these products do so properly protected. However, when they spray the crops they do so while the workers are picking the fruit bent over with their skin barely covered by cotton clothing. These toxic substances damage our bodies as much as they damage the soil, and they damage women’s bodies the most. One has to do with endocrine-related reasons – generally speaking, bodies with more oestrogen have a higher percentage of fat, which causes endocrine disruptors 7 to accumulate to a greater extent. The other is connected to historical and cultural reasons – women are often exposed to a greater extent to other dangerous substances found in cleaning products and cosmetics, which end up causing a “chemical cocktail” about which we have little information. However, the illnesses we suffer from toxic agro-chemicals are not considered occupational diseases. Neither the company nor the state can be held responsible for the consequences of the industrial agricultural model on our bodies.
It “so happens” that Huelva is one of the provinces with the highest cancer rates. Together with Seville and Cadiz, it forms what has been called “the triangle of death” due to the number of oncological processes associated with polluting industries. This is the flip side of progress; something never discussed when a new industrial project opens its doors declaring that it will help combat depopulation and generate employment and wealth. Labour and climate deregulation is paradoxically reflected in the deregulation of our cellular tissues.
Environmental disaster in Huelva Province
Industrial agriculture is not only destroying Doñana, but may also drain the Guadiana dry now more that than 6,000 hectares of land have been devoted to intensive agriculture in the Andévalo area. But there is more, much more. Our estuaries have also been destroyed by phosphogypsum, Huelva’s industrial Chemical Park has made the air unbreathable, and new mining projects are booming, destroying our mountains as they do so. The Guadalquivir Hydrographic Conference, the body that issues two-year forecasts to the region’s population, has issued a drought warning. This summer there have been water restrictions in ten villages in the Sierra de Huelva, including Cala, Aracena and Aroche, while the Corumbel reservoir is at 25%, down by 7% from the same week last year.
We are diving headlong into the abyss, at full speed. It appears that this is what our local governments are pursuing – and, of course, the central administration is allowing them to do so, – while constantly selling us the “green transition” and the 2030 Agenda, which itself is being “greenwashed” of its content. An example of this is the Fertiberia business group’s project, which, through a discourse laden with eco-sustainable promises, proposes to cover the phosphogypses with a mere layer of earth. Progress and well-being are being sold to us, but the most important end goal is to ensure maximum short term economic profitability. If they end up destroying everything, those who now defend these interests may well have large amounts of money in their pockets. They will be comfortably able to leave here and look for another area out of which to plunder, pillage and suck every last resource and cent. But what will be left for us, the ordinary people? Perhaps we will have to emigrate, and seek a life in conditions similar to those currently suffered by migrants working in the Huelva, Murcia and Almeria pits.
However, the future is not written in stone. It is in our hands to change its direction. Informing citizens of the reality of the situation, and calling for mobilisation in defence of our territory, our natural heritage and the rights of all people is a matter of urgence. Change is in our hands. The deciding factor will be whether we truly have the will for real change, for a radical transformation of our economy and our ways of life that will allow us to move towards a social model capable of guaranteeing a dignified life for all beings that inhabit the earth. There are alternatives, there are solutions and there are people who are already implementing them. We, for our part, have some proposals. We will tell you about them in the next chapter.
1 Some of the reflections in this chapter have already appeared in an article published in Ctxt magazine in May 2022: “El
agua vale más que el oro (rojo)”. Available at https://ctxt.es/es/20220501/Firmas/39640/Nazaret-Castro-fresa-sequiaextractivismo-agricultura-intensiva-explotacion.htm
2 When considering this issue, the most significant work to refer to is that of Manuel Delgado Cabeza, a seminal figure in the critique of the territorial division of labour, territorial specialisation, and extractivism in Andalusia. See M. Delgado and M. A. Aragón, “Los campos andaluces en la globalización. Almería y Huelva, fábrica de hortalizas”, in M. Etxezarreta (ed.), La agricultura española en la era de la globalización, Madrid: Ministerio de Agricultura y Pesca, 2006, p. 423- 474.
3 See “¿Qué ocurre con el agua en Doñana? Las extracciones de agua subterránea para regar los cultivos de frutos rojos y el consumo humano secan el humedal”, in Maldita.es. Periodismo para que no te la Cuelen, 21 February 2022, https://maldita.es/malditateexplica/20220221/donana-agua-pozos-ilegales-fresas-cultivos-agua-parlamento/
4 Junta de Andalucía, “Plan especial de ordenación de las zonas de regadío ubicadas al norte de la corona forestal de Doñana. Estudio de impacto ambiental”, 2014, https://www.juntadeandalucia.es/export/drupaljda/estudio_impacto_ambiental_0.pdf
5 Carmen Díaz Paniagua et al., “El sistema de lagunas temporales del Parque Nacional de Doñana. Aplicación a la gestión y conservación de hábitats acuáticos singulares”, in Proyectos de investigación en parques nacionales: 2011- 2014, CSIC.es, 2014, https://digital.csic.es/bitstream/10261/169717/1/Sistema_lagunas_temporales_PNDo%C3%B1ana_Cap_L_2016.pdf
6 Jordi Landero, “Roban 500 kilos de mangos recién tratados con un insecticida altamente tóxico en una finca de Isla Cristina”, in Huelva Información, 10 September 2020, https://www.huelvainformacion.es/provincia/Roban-insecticidaaltamente-Isla-Cristina_0_1500150257.html.
7 Endocrine disruptors alter our hormonal system. On agrochemicals and their differential effects on women’s bodies and, more generally, on the consequences for our health of the patriarchal bias in medicine, see the work of Carme Valls-Llobet, in particular Medio ambiente y salud. Mujeres y hombres en un mundo de nuevos riesgos, Madrid: Cátedra, 2018.
