Don't Buy Spanish Strawberries Via NY Transfer News * All the News That Doesn't Fit source - "Chris R"@ainfos.ca, christopher@nodo50.org ________________________________________________ A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C E http://www.ainfos.ca/ ________________________________________________ STRAWBERRIES FROM HUELVA? NO THANKS! The strawberries from Huelva (Spain) that reach your table seriously damage the environment and affect the health and social conditions of strawberry pickers. Consumers should be alarmed by the vast amount of toxic substances used to grow strawberries in Huelva. Over five thousand immigrants -most of them from North Africa- have suffered from hunger this year in the improvised plastic shantytowns they halve built. The employers have replaced them with other immigrants: Polish and Rumanian women contracted in their home countries. In this way, strawberry growers are repressing the immigrants that struggled for and obtained their papers last year. Social organisations from Andalusia call on you to BOICOT strawberries from Huelva. Demonstrate against the "hunger camps" and support the employment of all immigrants without any discrimination. We ask you to widely publish the following article "The Strawberries you Eat" (originally published as "Las fresas que te comes" on www.red-libertaria.org/nuevo/textos/fresager.html) to help make consumers act in consequence. @@@ THE STRAWBERRIES YOU EAT By Ramon Germinal Strawberries and sugar, strawberries and orange juice, strawberry milkshakes (made with "real" strawberries), strawberries and cream, etc. Most strawberries consumed by Europeans come from the Spanish province of Huelva. Sometimes shops in towns disguise them as "locally grown" so that the unwary tourists who visit such-and-such a beautiful city can buy something genuine and local. At other times they are barefacedly announced as being from the Barcelona seacoast even though they are in boxes labelled Palos de la Frontera (Huelva). The same goes for events that promote local produce, such as the Communist Party's fiesta in Barcelona where both the slogans and the strawberries were equally false. A big fat strawberry is known in Spanish as a fressn, a rock-hard flavourless strawberry that can stand the lengthy shipments of globalisation, should be known, without a doubt, as the "strawberry" of Huelva. But the strawberry grown in Huelva is not from Huelva. Every year strawberry growers fork over millions of dollars in royalties to Californian industries. The strawberry is global plant with an American copyright that is nourished and sustained in the sturdy pinetree forests of the central plains of Spain where it rarely rains, before being plucked and replanted to bear fruits in the sandy farmlands of Huelva and finally sold and eaten throughout nearly all the world. It needs dead microbe-free soil, to keep the strawberry free from attacks. So it is sown in a carpet of toxic phytosanitary products which, besides eliminating all kinds of bugs, helps to widen the gap in the ozone layer, causing thousands of cases skin cancer each year. Growing strawberries contributes to the buoyant healthcare business. Strawberry farming is somewhat painstaking and expensive. Bedded under plastic, needing large quantities of chemical fertilisers, pesticides, herbicides and lots of manhours of picking time. The public authorities help by freely collecting the debris of waste plastics, and in the event that they don't, the farms are surrounded by generous ravines, gullies, marshes, roads and pine forests that don't ask anything to shelter the used plastic. Finally, when the heap grows too large, a match can turn it into contaminating smoke, modestly helping to warm the planet, which is good news: if the temperatures go up we won't have to cover the strawberries with plastic any more! Fertilisers and other "poisons" have a high price, at least the farmers do not have to pay for the so-called "diffuse agrarian contamination" of the wells, rivers and streams caused by the use of toxic substances. Who would dream of demanding that! Water (public property according to the law), when contaminated, provokes numerous illnesses increasing the number of sick people, captive clients of the hospitals and of the industry of bottled "mineral" water. And they say that only farmers profit by strawberry farming! The large European distributors and the packing and shipping companies take the largest chunk of the strawberry business profits. Then the farmers have to pay -besides royalties- the plastic, fertilisers and phytosanitary products to the powerful transnational chemical companies. When heavy wind and rain emerge, the crops are destroyed. It is some consolation that from time to time, the State listens to their demands and covers their expenses. With so many odds against him, how can the farmer make a profit? By squeezing the last drop out of the pickers. In the last few years thousands of Andalusian, together with immigrant Portuguese and North African day labourers (many women) have picked strawberries in the fields of Huelva. A hard backbending job paid by the box, hours spent under a blazing sun, a tiny salary and dwellings rented at tourist prices are some of the things suffered by the person behind the hands that picks the strawberries you eat. Farmers cannot allow themselves the luxury of workers who make demands. They began by attacking the trade unionists and followed by denying jobs to workers who lived in combative towns, substituting them with immigrants. Better if they were illegal, 'cos they protested less. With the new foreigners' law in place, and after last year's lock-ins and protests, some 1200 North African workers got their papers in order. They were "regularised" to work exclusively on farms in the province of Huelva. Neither the farm bosses nor the institutional trade unions (absent in the previous struggles) could consent to allowing the immigrants who had struggled for their papers to work on these farms. At the end of autumn of 2001, government officials, representatives of the employers associations (ASAJA and COAG) and of the trade unions (CCOO and UGT) agreed to contract over 7000 immigrants in their home countries. This agreement was then approved by the Office of Immigrant Coordination. So the employers went shopping in the multinational labour mall, hiring some 4500 people in Poland, more than 1500 in Rumania and the rest, up to 7000, in Morocco and Colombia. They hire preferably women to avoid that they remain in Huelva, as throughout the world women carry on their backs the heavy load of family responsibility. The government does not seem to care that the numbers of contracts do not square up. The 2002 prevision for contingent of farmhands to be hired in their home countries for the province of Huelva is only of 3500. They know that by doubling the number of contracts, the rebels of last year -"bad folks them Moors, dirty, dark thieves and terrorists"- will lose their jobs. Instead, the hands that pick your strawberries belong to blonde white people. Docile and willing to undertake the road of return. Some 5000 North Africans have raised plastic shantytowns in the strawberry field villages, jobless and without any means of existence, they starve, and beg even for water, while others rob. A few days ago several hundred lead a march from these villages to the capital, organised by the unions that help them (CGT, SU and SOC). A good part of the 1200 who obtained papers only to work on the farms of Huelva, despised by the farmers, took part in this march: perhaps in the near future, when the crops are fully ripe and all hands are needed, maybe then the bosses will hire them. They will have learnt the lesson well: one must bend over, with a well-humiliated and submissive body in order to pick strawberries. In the meantime, the mayors and the powers that be in the villages of the zone are demanding a hard and heavy hand and deportations. It is being applied selectively, anyone in whose face the word "protest" can be seen is deported. Although the Delegation of the Government in Huelva estimates there are more than 2500 illegal workers in the hunger camps, it does not expel them: they will be useful as semi-slave labour in the few days that the strawberry fields are in maximum splendour. If you still fancy eating strawberries from Huelva, then you have lost something more than your tastebuds. HUNGER CAMPS IN STRAWBERRY FIELDS? FOR NO EVER! BOYCOTT STRAWBERRIES FROM HUELVA (SPAIN). Red Libertaria Apoyo Mutuo www.red-libertaria.org internacional@red-libertaria.org Apdo 51575, 28080 Madrid, Spain ******** ****** The A-Infos News Service ****** News about and of interest to anarchists ****** COMMANDS: lists@ainfos.ca REPLIES: a-infos-d@ainfos.ca HELP: a-infos-org@ainfos.ca WWW: http://www.ainfos.ca/ INFO: http://www.ainfos.ca/org To receive a-infos in one language only mail lists@ainfos.ca the message: unsubscribe a-infos subscribe a-infos-X where X = en, ca, de, fr, etc. (i.e. the language code) ================================================================= NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org e-mail: nyt@blythe.org ================================================================= nytlab-04.26.02-02:32:53-9347