No, it didn’t snow.

José Manuel, a greenhouse farmer in San Agustín, Almería.

Warehouse workers in the alhóndigas, greenhouse farmers’ marketplace.

Time for an update on where this is all coming from; El Ejido. This is where I am, a town in the southern Spanish province of Almería, the center of intensive agriculture known as the ‘sea of plastic’ – named after the thousands of hectares of plastic covered greenhouses that produce very much of the vegetables found in Europe’s supermarkets. It is also a hub for cheap immigrant labour and, it would appear, racial segregation – whether intended or unintended. Figures vary from source to source, but we have been told that there are as many as 140.000 immigrant workers here, which as far as I can tell outnumbers the Spanish population.

Oh, and I’m here with Lucas, didn’t I tell? Lucas has based himself in Spain for the time being, working out of Galicia up in the leafy north, on issues of farming and food production, among other things. When he started talking about El Ejido months back, around the same time I decided to try and do some work about immigration along Europe’s southern border, our ways seemed destined to meet here. So for the past five days we’ve been bumming around the region, among greenhouse after greenhouse, meeting people involved in various steps in either production or immigration, or both. Though we’re realizing there is very much work to be done here, and that it would take much more time than we have right now, we surely haven’t been lazy. Lots and lots of good walking, and more ahead in the next few days. It’s a very strange landscape.

More soon…

Market price chart in the alhóndigas, greenhouse farmers’ marketplace. Price of end-season cucumber: €0.18 per kilo.

The Medina in Tetouan, Morocco.

There’s been many, many reports and testimonies coming out of Iraq of totally disproportionate use of aggression by coalition soldiers, be they the contracted mercenaries of Xe/Blackwater (read here, here and most particularly here for some of the most gruesome accounts), US Army soldiers (or robots). Very sadly they are most likely but the tip of the iceberg. The above video, posted on wikileaks.org yesterday, probably spells much about today’s video game generation of soldiers that we send into combat completely detached from reality, and about the training they receive. The video shows how a US helicopter crew engages and kills a group of Iraqi civilians in Baghdad, based on grainy video images showing ‘insurgents’. In fact the people on the street were unarmed civilians and a Reuters photographer, Namir Noor-Eldeen and driver, Saeed Chmagh, whose cameras were mistaken for weapons and quickly translated into ‘AK47′s and ‘RPGs’. The video pretty much speaks for itself, but the N.Y.Times also wrote about it here. Just horrible, horrible.

Drawings by immigrants in the Centro de Estancia Temporal de Inmigrantes (CETI). Ceuta, 2010.