Life in Cartagena

One of the key elements of my job is talking. This morning I was talking to one of my English students; working hard. Murcia is an important vegetable growing area and my student works for one of the firms that grows salad crops some of which are destined for the UK market. From what he tells me the company sounds like a dynamic, safety conscious, modern, European business. He had been astonished when one of their UK trading partners sent a message asking for confirmation that his firm doesn't employ slave labour.  The student was scandalised. He couldn't understand why anyone in the UK would think that his firm may use forced labour. We talked about the many immigrant workers who find themselves trapped here, brought in under false pretences, their passports taken from them and forced to work in any number of degrading situations from building work to prostitution. I was reminded of the domestic workers in the UK whose bosses hold their passports, of those Chinese cockle pi...

Years ago, wandering across Almeria we were shocked by the miles and miles of plastic sheeting that covered much of the agricultural land. From a distance the plastic sheeting shines like the sea or a snowy landscape. Close up it looks like what it is, a cheap way to build a greenhouse type controlled environment by spreading the sheeting across a frame. It looks horrid, it scars the landscape and I've always presumed that it was a way of improving the already intensive market garden type crops produced in the Southern ends of Spain - tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, aubergines and the like. We had a bit of a trip out today to the town of Aguilas at the Southern end of Murcia, just a stone's throw from the border with the province of Almeria in the region of Andalucia and, guess what? Lots of plastic. It's odd. When I very first came to Spain some thirty or more years ago even I noticed the rough and ready looking veg. It was easy to think that those scarred and blemishe...