The COVID-19 has made the structural deficiencies of the global agri-food system more visible than ever. Especially noteworthy have been the problems related to the management of labour force in intensive agriculture models in the south of Europe (Molinero, 2021). The closure of borders has not only forced to seek alternatives, but it has also called into question the high dependence on migrant labour and their poor working and living conditions. Although agricultural workers have been labelled as ‘essential’ to ensure the non-interruption of food chains, this has not been translated into a greater guarantee of their basic needs and labour rights (Castillero, 2020a; Pedreño, 2020). Quite the contrary, although some countries such as Italy had initiatives like the regularisation of migrant workers to ensure the supply of food and their access to health (Corrado and Palumbo, 2021; European Migration Network, 2020), in other European countries these initiatives have not succeeded. In this context, the concepts of “migratory utilitarianism” (Sayad, 1986) or “economic utilitarianism” (Morice, 2004) have gained traction more than ever, stressing the use of temporary migrant workers for mere economic purposes.

The agricultural enclave of Huelva is no exception. Being the second largest producer of red fruits in the world with more than 378 tons in 2019 (FEPEX, 2019) after California (USA), it has the capacity to hire about 100,000 people per campaign. Although there is no aggregate data on the sociodemographic composition of the labour force ̶ given the high incidence of informal work and the decentralisation of recruitment mechanisms ̶ , it is estimated that half of the workers (around 50,000) are of migrant origin ¹ . An important part of these (varying across the years) comes from the recruitment in origin programme (Gestión Colectiva de Contratación en Origen, GECCO), which since the campaign of 2009-2010 revolve solely around Moroccan women (Moreno, 2012) ² . The rest are seasonal workers from Eastern Europe and migrant population residing in Spain that concatenate several campaigns across the country, plus some ‘sporadic’ migrant workers (Güell & Garcés-Mascareñas, 2020).

Although seasonal workers’ programmes are a widely studied phenomenon, especially during the first decade of the 2000s until approximately 2015 (Arab, 2010; Gordo, 2014; Gordo et al., 2013; Gualda, 2012; Macías et al., 2016), the impact of the 2008 crisis and the decline of GECCO’s quotas led to a reduction of research in this field. Yet, since 2017 these flows have experienced an important rebound that has once again put on the table the deficiencies of the program and of the intensive agricultural model. In views of this gap, this article aims to shed light on the evolution of the GECCO programme in recent years and, especially, on the impact of the pandemic focusing on the group of Moroccan women. More particularly, the paper seeks to examine the intersectional forms of exploitation and discrimination embedded in the nature and modus operandi of the GECCO programme and point out how these have become more visible during the pandemic in three specific fields: recruitment, working conditions and living conditions.

To this aim, the analytical framework of intersectionality is used to unveil how the different social divisions (gender, ethnicity, class, etc.) are mutually constituted and are at the basis of structural inequalities reproduced by GECCO. This is in a context of progressive feminisation of agricultural work and a segmentation of the labour market on ethnic and sexual grounds (Gadea et al., 2015; Reigada, 2011). As we will argue, in comparison to other migrant groups and autochthonous workers, female temporary labourers recruited in Morocco are exposed to specific forms of abuse and discrimination, mainly due to their condition of mothers from rural and poor areas. In close connection to the world-ecology theory of capitalism, this is also explained by the embeddedness of GECCO in asymmetric centre-periphery relations, where the productive work of Moroccan women in Spain is systemically linked to the reproductive work in their home country (Hellio & Moreno, 2017). Moreover, the concept of ‘geographies of intersectionality’ (Rodó-Zárate, 2021) allows to point out how inequalities are also intersected with time and space in the construction of power relationships.

After this introduction, the article continues with the theoretical framework around the feminisation of agricultural work, the world-ecology theory of capitalism and intersectionality, by pointing out the links between them and their usefulness for the purpose of this paper. Then, a brief methodological note is pointed out referring to the project details that support the research. This is followed by a contextual framework on the evolution of the GECCO programme to date in the enclave of Huelva. Finally, the results are presented based on the three main themes of the article: recruitment, working conditions and living conditions, ending with some conclusions.

The feminisation of agricultural work has been influenced by the increasing feminisation of international migration and the progressive labour incorporation of migrant women into labour markets of Western reception societies (Reigada, 2011). On the one hand, international migrations have become feminised thanks to the role of women as pioneers of migratory chains. This role has led to a reinterpretation of the ‘immigrant’ from a purely economic and masculine point of view to give rise to a female figure as the head of the family that transforms work and family relationships, as well as the organisation of domestic groups (Parella, 2003; Gregorio, 1998). In the Spanish context, this role has been widely recognised in some groups of Latin American women, who have been inserted in the care and domestic sectors. However, the role played by certain groups of women (Eastern European or Moroccan) as protagonists of labour migration in the seasonal agricultural sector has been less explored and recognised (Gualda, 2012). The economic and social crisis in the countries of origin and the demand for female and migrant labour in certain niches of the destination societies are key factors that have driven this new pattern (Reigada, 2011). Beyond the most pressing economic motivations, female temporary workers also pursue circular migration for symbolic reasons related to migratory success and personal autonomy (Moreno, 2012).

However, the incorporation of migrant women in niches like the seasonal work is highly determined by the segmentation of the labour market of host countries (Gadea et al., 2015) and the international labour division on ethnic and sexual grounds (Hirata, 1997) within the context of asymmetric relationships between the global North and South. The world-ecology theory of capitalism (Moore, 2015) looks at this kind of relationships, where the central countries of advanced capitalism mobilise racialised labour force from the periphery to work, in this case, in the agricultural sector (Hellio & Moreno, 2021).

From this perspective, human labour and extra human nature (the environment) are part of the same matrix from which processes of production and reproduction are analysed (Molinero & Avallone, 2017). As Hellio & Moreno (2021) explain, capitalist accumulation expands through commodity fronts (Moore, 2015), seeking new territories (spatial or social) that have not yet been commodified and whose conquest opens new cycles of profitability. In this search, capitalism appropriates these territories and their “free gifts of nature” which include, among others, the free labour of women. Under this logic, capitalist accumulation is not only linked to the processes of labour exploitation, but also to the cheap or free appropriation of vital activities such as unpaid reproductive work. And this appropriation is possible thanks to its naturalization and its ideological devaluation compared to productive work. In this way, a systemic nexus is established between unpaid female and racialised work, and capitalist development, as other authors have also shown (e.g. Federici, 2018).

The world-ecology theory of capitalism is in turn related to feminist theories focused on the nexus between production and social reproduction, also from a decolonial perspective (Molinero & Avallone, 2017). In this sense, intersectionality appears as an analytical frame, which despite not having been used in this field yet, turns out useful to explain how this systemic nexus operates by looking at the mutual constitution of different axes of inequality. Even if the concept was coined by black feminists in the USA three decades ago (Collins, 1990; Crenshaw, 1989) to account for the interrelation of social categories of gender, race and class, this has evolved into a whole field of study that provides theoretical and methodological approaches to different social phenomena (Cho et al., 2013). In short, intersectionality allows to “locate social categories and divisions within a broader social framing that attends to power, hierarchy and context (both spatial and temporal)” (Anthias, 2013, p. 6).

In this paper, intersectionality proves useful to understand how the interrelation of social divisions is reflected in specific forms of discrimination and exploitation embedded in the GECCO programme and how these differ according to the composition of temporary workers’ groups. Secondly, it is useful to understand how this interrelation is built in a specific time and context through the concept of ‘geographies of intersectionality’ (Rodó-Zárate, 2021). This argues the need to look at intersecting inequalities in close connection with the place and time where these occur, as well as at power relationships that exist in and are produced by places at a structural level. In this sense, “the social relations of space are experienced and interpreted differently by people with different positions” (Massey, 1994, p. 3 in Rodó-Zarate, 2021, p. 67). Following the case of GECCO, the living spaces offered by employers could be used and experienced differently depending on the composition of the migrant groups residing there. The same applies to the specific forms of abuse and control at workplaces, establishing a link between the material and ideological dimensions through gender ideologies around honour and the sexual division of labour (Hellio & Moreno, 2017).

On a broader level, the intersection of social divisions with space and time relate to the centre-periphery relations between Spain and Morocco as a result of the colonial past, and to the emergence of Huelva as a border (Castillero, 2021). As Hellio & Moreno (2017) argue, the birth of the GECCO programme is strictly linked to the delocalisation of Spanish red berries companies to Morocco in the late ‘80s. Since then, this has facilitated direct investments of capital, the transfer of know-how and the mobility of farmers, technical staff and workers from one country to the other. Even though both countries occupy an apparent similar peripherical position within the global agri-food chain, they maintain asymmetrical relationships displayed in the control of exports by foreign (and especially Spanish) companies based in Morocco. When it comes to the circulation of female workers, gender intersects with administrative vulnerability and the post-colonial condition to produce flexibility in each context. At the same time, circularity through regular contracts allows to establish a temporal, spatial and juridical border between the productive and reproductive spheres. This leads to the understanding of the phenomenon from a transnational lens, where the material, affective and symbolic resources are managed between two territorial settings (Moreno, 2012).

Summing up, this article aims to fill a theoretical gap in the debate around feminisation of the agricultural work by bringing in the intersectional approach in straight relation to the feminist contributions of the world-ecology capitalism. Departing from the structural nexus between productive and reproductive work, the paper sheds light on the different forms of discrimination and labour exploitation of migrant women that are embedded in the nature and implementation of the GECCO programme. This is by focusing on the intersection of social divisions embodied by female temporary workers in three key elements of the programme (recruitment, working conditions and housing) in a specific spatiotemporal context.

This paper stems from a European research project (ADMIGOV ³ ) which has analysed migration governance models in different types of policies, including circular migration and recruitment in origin programmes applied to agriculture. This manuscript is focused on the case of Spain and is fed by qualitative research techniques that include 30 in-depth and semi-structured interviews with 32 stakeholders, a review of key official documents issued by the main stakeholders (e.g. collective agreements, reports, protocols), as well as a review of news (mostly from the main national newspapers) on the difficulties and problems arisen in the context of pandemic during the spring and summer of 2020.

In relation to the fieldwork, the interviews were conducted mainly face-to-face in three field trips: two in Lleida and one in Huelva. These two provinces were selected for being the two historical territories in Spain with higher quotas of GECCO workers (Molinero, 2020). Whilst for this article we have only used half of the interviews related to the case of Huelva (15), the interviews conducted in Lleida have also been useful to understand structural dynamics of the agricultural work and the GECCO programme. Interviewees represent different organisations and institutions, including employers’ associations, individual employers, temping agencies, trade unions, regional and local administrations, NGOs and activists ⁴ .

Mobility restrictions obliged to conduct the fieldwork in a limited period of time between lockdowns (early Autumn 2020), which posed some difficulties of access to the field. Moreover, the management of agricultural seasonal workers has become a very sensitive topic in the last couple of years. In Huelva, the legal complaints for sexual abuse in 2018 ⁵ meant a turning point and since then, employers’ associations, temping agencies and farmers are very reluctant to participate in research studies. Nonetheless, the high number of interviews enabled to contrast data and complement different viewpoints from a wide range of actors. The analysis of data was conducted with Atlas TI and interviews were codified in order to keep anonymity.

The enclave of Huelva has become an icon of the agri-food sector of red berries, being the second producer of the world after California and the first one in Spain (López-Sala, 2016), producing more than 90% of all berries in Andalusia (FEPEX, 2019). While in the 1970s there were 700 hectares of strawberry fields (Molinero & Avallone, 2018), in 2020 these have expanded up to 11,700 hectares, including all red berries (FEPEX, 2020). This growth has implied a diversification of fruits, as well as a territorial dispersion across the province (Reigada, 2012).

The production system of this sector entails the maximum expression of the ‘just-in-time’ model, highly oriented to exterior markets (Pedreño, 2020; Gualda, 2012). Moreover, Huelva only controls the phase related to cultivation, handling and packing of the global agri-food chain. Research and technological innovation at the beginning, and merchandise trading and distribution at the end are controlled by multinational and large companies, which are often based outside the enclave (Reigada, 2011). This gives very little room of manoeuvre to local farmers to fix the price of the fruit. In fact, one of the few costs that they can adjust is the labour force. The increasing international competition and the need to import many means of production has resulted in a more and more scarce profitability since the 1990s (Hellio & Moreno, 2017). Even if the sector still generates millions of euros of turnovers (López-Sala, 2016; FEPEX, 2020), the fever of the ‘red gold’ of the 1980s has progressively faded out.

The conversion from a family model to an industrial one in the late 1980s (Molinero, 2020) led to the need of more labour demand. In a context of economic growth after the entry of Spain in the EU (in 1986), Andalusian workforce found more opportunities in other sectors such as construction or services following higher labour expectations (Allepuz & Torres, 2018). This shift left vacancies in the agriculture that were occupied by migrant workers, in a progressive process of ethnic substitution and feminisation of labour force (Gualda, 2012). The first groups were Maghrebian (and to a lesser extent Sub-Saharan) migrant men, who precisely because of their (often) irregular and socioeconomic status, were ready to work hard in poor conditions. However, in the end of the 1990s, several mobilisations and struggles were organised to claim their regularisation and access to labour rights, which led to employers expressing their need to seek more stable and reliable workforce under a legal framework. In this sociopolitical context is when the programme of GECCO was born (Gualda, 2012). Inspired by an experiment led by the Catalan agrarian union ‘Unió de Pagesos’ in 1999, it was implemented in other provinces like Huelva or Almería in 2000.

Despite the initial difficulties associated with a low index of return to the countries of origin (Molinero, 2020), the programme improved following the method of ‘learning by doing’ (López-Sala & Godenau, 2015). With the financial support of the EU (through the AENEAS and MARES I & II programmes), Huelva was regarded a model of reference across Europe (Molinero & Avallone, 2018). Circular migration was argued to be a ‘triple win’ (Vertovec, 2007): employers could meet labour demands, the governments could exert greater control over illegal migration, and the countries of origin ―in principle― could benefit from co-development through remittances and the increase of migrant workers’ capabilities (Gualda, 2012; Hellio, 2017).

In the last 20 years, the enclave of Huelva has gone through three phases: a) exponential growth with a peak of around 40,000 workers (1999-2007), b) decrease and stagnation around 2,000 workers as a result of the economic crisis (2008-2015), and c) recovery, from 2016 until today (Molinero, 2020). In 2017, 18,206 contracts in origin were issued and in 2018 nearly the same (18,880). In the campaign of 2019-2020 there were supposed to be 19,698, but due to the pandemic only 7,081 were finally formalised. In the current campaign (2020-2021), 14,000 contracts were approved affecting around 12,800 women ⁶ .

Whilst in the first ten years there was a mixture of nationalities including Morocco, Poland and Romania as the three largest countries, since 2010 there have been contracts only with Moroccan women. The entry of Eastern European countries in the EU and the failure of other pilot agreements with countries like Senegal, Ukraine or Philippines fostered the exclusion of these nationalities (Molinero, 2020), perceived as too mobile and unreliable. On the other hand, further grounds strengthened the agreement with Morocco: its geographical location (incurring lower economic costs of travel), the political interests of the EU for exploring the hiring of seasonal workers with third country nationals, a common colonial history between the two countries and the possibility to apply very specific criteria of selection according to the needs of production (Molinero, 2020; Hellio & Moreno, 2017; Gualda, 2012; Gordo, 2009).

Although recruitment in origin policies have been regarded to entail many advantages for employers and public administrations based on the availability of cheap, flexible and reliable labour force, these are less evident for migrant workers. As displayed in the results of this research, several processes of exclusion and discrimination take place already in the recruitment, which then continue in the fields and in the living spaces.

This article has shed light on the several forms of exploitation and discrimination embedded in the nature and modus operandi of the Spanish circular migration programme of temporary workers called Gestión Colectiva de Contrataciones en Origen (GECCO) from an intersectional perspective. To do so, the research has empirically focused on the agricultural enclave of red berries in Huelva for being the province that historically entails the highest quotas of seasonal workers and for hosting a highly feminised labour force under an industrial intensive agricultural model (Molinero, 2020). Emerging as a perfect source of cheap, reliable and flexible workforce, since 2009 GECCO has prioritised Moroccan women, applying stereotyped female attributes to the red berries sector’s needs (Gualda, 2012).

Following the quite novel analytical approach of intersectionality within the studies of feminisation of agricultural work, results have shown how the processes of discrimination and abuse cannot be understood without examining the social positioning of Moroccan women within the power and labour structure of GECCO. Such positioning is marked by the mutual constitution of different axes of inequality that lay across women’s identities and experiences within systemic centre-periphery relationships. But how particularly is this intersectionality reflected in female seasonal work? To answer this question, the analysis has focused in three key aspects of GECCO’s programme: recruitment, labour conditions and living conditions. Starting with recruitment, GECCO entails a clear form of institutional intersectional discrimination based on the exclusive selection of Moroccan women of middle age from rural areas with family responsibilities. In this sense, the interplay of motherhood with gender, ethnicity, rural origin, age, and cultural background conforms an ideal type of worker that can easily be submitted to hierarchical power relationships by employers.

Once in Huelva, several frauds and trickeries take place when the promised working and living conditions are not accomplished (e.g. working less than 75% of their stay). In this sense, besides the usual abuses that other temporary workers like autochthonous labourers, (undocumented) migrants or agricultural workers from Eastern Europe suffer (e.g. underpayment, precarious conditions), Moroccan women are exposed to other forms of abuse. Their dependence on particular employers by contract leaves them in a very difficult position to express any discontent or leave the programme if they want to repeat future campaigns. Even if they manifest several forms of agency, their poor education and language skills, and the reproduction of traditional gender roles and ideologies by workers and employers reinforce patterns of exploitation that are even sexually materialised. As for the living conditions, this is highlighted in the tight control of their mobility (by even retaining passports and confining them in limited spaces) and in patronising attitudes on their sexual behaviour and decisions around pregnancy, abortion, and motherhood. As a matter of fact, some even argue that GECCO grants less mobility and freedom to their workers in comparison to informal arrangements with undocumented migrants, and GECCO may end up ̶paradoxically̶ being less protective (Hellio, 2017).

Furthermore, this article acknowledges that such processes of discrimination and abuse need to be circumscribed within a specific temporal and spatial framework. In other words, intersectionality needs to be geographically located in order not to essentialise the experiences of migrant women and provide dynamism to its interpretation (Rodó-Zárate, 2021). As for the most immediate temporal framework, the pandemic has clearly tensioned the intensive agricultural model by making its deficiencies more visible than ever and by adding new axes of inequality such as the health status of women in the management of illnesses, pregnancy and abortions. It has also evidenced more than ever how the systemic nexus between productive work in Spain and reproductive work in Morocco is only valid if early motherhood is delocalised in the global South.

Taking a larger temporal scale, one must refer to the embeddedness of GECCO in (post)colonial relationships that foster the vulnerable position of female temporary workers. In this sense, inequalities experienced in Morocco are also reproduced in Spain. Following the conceptualisation of Huelva as a border (Castillero, 2021; Hellio and Moreno, 2017), it is not only about the import/export of labour demand between the two territorial settings, but also of non-material resources (e.g. traditional gender ideologies operating in working and living spaces). At the same time, as argued by theorists of world-ecology capitalism (Moore, 2015), this is possible thanks to the naturalisation of free (or cheap) reproductive work in the country of origin. In sum, the systemic nexus of productive and reproductive work emerges as a cornerstone of the accumulation of capital and the functioning of global agri-food chains.