On August 11, as temperatures soared above 40 degree Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit), Gheorghe Vranciu was on a ten-hour shift picking fruit near Lleida, Catalonia. By 2 p.m., the sixty-one-year-old Romanian had become overwhelmed by the heat — and asked to go home.
“[His supervisor’s] response was that he was just drunk, even though my father didn’t drink alcohol,” his son Ovidio told local media. “She then told him to go to the end of the row of fruit trees that they were harvesting and sit there in the shade. No one called an ambulance, no one took him home, and no one even notified us.”
Three hours later, he died of heatstroke still lying under the same tree, with the emergency services yet to arrive.
Vranciu wasn’t the only seasonal farmworker to lose his life amid Spain’s extreme heat this summer. During record temperatures in June, an undocumented Pakistani worker also succumbed to heatstroke after being dropped outside the entrance of a medical center in Fraga, Aragón, by colleagues who then fled the scene.
“After he collapsed, the company where he had been picking fruit refused to call an ambulance or to take him to the hospital as he was employed illegally without a work permit,” explains Rachid El Jazouli, who is regional agricultural officer for trade union Comisiones Obreras. “They just left him lying there on the ground as if he were an animal and so other Pakistani workers, who were also undocumented, took the risk of bringing him to the hospital themselves.”
According to the Andalusian Workers’ Union (SAT), a farm laborer from Senegal, who worked in the vast industrial greenhouses in the southern region of Almería, also died of heatstroke on the job on August 27. A forty-year-old Moroccan was admitted to an intensive care unit for the same condition in Murcia, having worked most of his shift without a water break.
Spain is the European Union’s largest fruit and vegetable producer, with exports topping €18 billion in 2024.
Yet those whose work sustains this lucrative sector now find themselves on the front line of the country’s climate crisis. As migration researcher Yoan Molinero notes, “The profitability of Spain’s agri-industrial model requires a mass of precarious and exploitable labor — leaving migrant farm workers among the most vulnerable groups in the Spanish labor market.” He insists that now “climate change is producing a multiplier effect in this respect, further aggravating the poor working conditions and risks these workers are exposed to.”
This was underscored by a recent study from the University of Lleida, which found that half of a sample group of seasonal workers monitored by its researchers during the 2024 harvest had worked in a state of dehydration. It also reported that workers lost up to two kilograms of body weight from picking pears during just four hours on the hottest day last summer.
Throughout the nectarine, peach, and pear harvests from June to August, approximately 40,000 temporary workers are employed in Lleida, with a further 10,000 in the adjoining zone of Baix Cinca in Aragón. “Many are nomadic migrant laborers coming from the berry-picking season in southern Spain, and who will then go on to the grape harvest in La Rioja in September,” notes Gemma Casal from Lleida-based social organization Fruita amb Justícia Social.
On a sweltering late August evening in Lleida capital, I meet one of these workers: Malick, forty-eight, from Senegal. “It has been very tough to work in the fields the last couple of weeks,” he acknowledges. “Some days we finish at 1 or 2 p.m. because of the heat and others at 4 p.m. but we start early at 6 a.m.”
His main grievance, however, is that like hundreds of other fruit pickers, he is sleeping rough in the city. A legal resident in Spain for the past five years, Malick says he “works six days a week, sometimes seven,” but that “it is still impossible to find a bed.” “Even when one becomes free in a flat, it is so expensive,” he continues. “And so, I’ve been sleeping outside at the back of this car park for a month now.”
In Catalonia, employers are legally required to provide accommodation to seasonal workers like Malick. But, according to Casal, “the legislation is not consistently enforced by the labor inspectorate.” She sees this as “just one way farms and temporary employment agencies cut costs at the expense of workers’ welfare,” noting that “for many farm laborers, this means they are left on the streets without any respite from the heat even in their free time.”
Trade unionist El Jazouli maintains that there are rampant violations of the health and safety protocols that do exist for heat waves — stressing how on the day Vranciu died there was an orange alert warning in place recommending against intense outdoor physical activity between 1 and 9 p.m. He acknowledges that “some farms with which we have negotiated have shortened the working day during high temperature alerts or, alternatively, have ensured five-minute water breaks every hour.” Yet “many others simply ignore such protocols when they have ripe fruit that needs to be picked and shipped to Rotterdam within twenty-four hours.”
For his part, Óscar Moret, a representative in Baix Cinca for Spain’s main farmers’ union, recognizes that increasingly long heat waves are a serious challenge at harvest time. “A few years ago, I would just tell my workers not to come in on certain days when it was above 40 degrees Celsius. But now when you have heat waves lasting eleven days, that is not an option.”
Yet he also insists his members — mainly smaller and midsize agricultural producers — aren’t the problem. He points out that when he died, Vranciu was working for a temporary employment agency on an estate of a company controlled by one of Catalonia’s richest men. He argues that the growth of large-scale corporate-owned farms is also affecting the sector’s ability to respond to extreme temperatures.
“We have had a huge amount of investment pour into the sector over the last decade, which has put intense pressure on farmers to scale up and turn to higher value crops like cherries and peaches,” he explains. “On my family-run farm, as I work a lot with the same regular group of workers, I know who struggles the most in the heat and can look out for anyone in trouble. But when you have three hundred agency workers on a farm owned by an investment fund, all of that is very difficult to do.”
Five hundred miles to the south in Huelva, Andalusia, unseasonably high temperatures during planting season, followed by nearly two months of heavy rainfall, disrupted this year’s spring berry-picking season. This left many migrant laborers with considerably reduced income.
“I don’t have work right now and there is very little around,” thirty-eight-year-old Sidia from Gambia told me in May outside the migrant shantytown where he lives in Palos de Frontera. “In the company where I have been picking up shifts this year, you are given a choice — a set daily rate, which does not reach fifty euros, or you are paid [illegally] by the quantity of berries you pick,” he explains. “I am fast, so I prefer being paid by the crate.”
Payment below the legal daily minimum — €57.50 — is chronic in Huelva. All the more than twenty laborers I spoke to in May were paid below that rate. Yet this year’s weather disruptions created a particularly desperate situation for the region’s undocumented farmworkers — accounting for a quarter of the total.
One such worker is twenty-four-year-old Omar from Mauritania. “The last time I worked was two months ago, and even when I was hired, they paid me less than workers with papers,” he explains. “I try to survive doing odd jobs and at the end of the season, they will hopefully pay us to take down the plastic coverings in the fields,” he continues. “But right now things are very tough.”
Molinero argues that extreme weather events are also “impacting the precarious housing situation of migrant farmworkers, in particular those residing in informal shantytowns.” Multiple settlements in Huelva suffered heavy flooding last October during the DANA weather front — a sudden storm system that brought torrential rain. Footage showed residents trying to salvage personal belongings from makeshift homes made out of corrugated metal sheets, wood, and plastic. Further flooding hit two settlements in January.
A 2025 study published by the Andalusian Association for Human Rights estimates that 5,000 people live in such improvised shelters in Huelva and around 7,000 in Almería province — in conditions a 2020 UN report characterized as “worse” than those of a refugee camp.
Lacking running water and basic sanitation services, residents in some settlements have to walk miles just to reach the nearest public tap. On a visit to several such shantytowns in May with a representative from the SAT union, I witnessed residents resorting to using plastic pesticide containers to transport water for washing and cleaning — thus potentially exposing themselves to serious health risks from chemical residues.
According to Juan Castillo Rojas, who is Molinero’s colleague at the Centre for Migration Studies, a further climate-related challenge facing the residents of these shantytowns this spring and summer was “a near-constant mosquito infestation — something not seen before 2024.” “Residents are living in shacks made of metal and plastic but have to keep their doors shut in 30 degrees Celsius [86 degrees Fahrenheit] weather to stop the mosquitos entering,” he explains.
But for Sidia and other residents there are few alternatives. “The locals won’t rent us rooms here or offer us accommodation on the farms,” he insists. “They treat us worse than dogs. Every year, there are fires in the shantytowns and right now we are having problems with mosquitoes. It is a disgrace how they treat us — but we have no choice but to live here.”
Back in Lleida, local bishop Daniel Palau Valero warned against the “advancing dehumanization” of migrant farmworkers after the deaths this summer of both Vranciu and the unnamed Pakistani worker in neighboring Fraga.
Lleida has become a bastion of support for the far-right, anti-migrant Catalan Alliance, which frames the presence of homeless seasonal workers as a source of criminality. The latest La Vanguardia polling places the party as the most popular in the region, even as its policy of mass enforced deportations would rob rural communities of workers they depend on.
Yet, for Fruita amb Justícia Social’s Llibert Rexach, this surge in far-right support should “not be interpreted as farmers voting against the basis of their own productive model but instead reflects a desire among many to have migrant workers further stripped of their rights.”
“Operating under increasingly tough market conditions, many farmers treat these workers as expendable manpower to exploit,” he continues. “They see in the far right a political force that will defend their right to do so, while also giving voice to their sense of rural abandonment.”
Yet the death of the unnamed Pakistani who died from heatstroke in June points to just how vulnerable such workers are already. In Spain for less than a year, he had found work through a grey market employment agency, which recruited undocumented workers via illegal, so-called “gangmaster” networks.
“The [Pakistani] man who died would not have been hired directly by an agency but rather by an intermediary of the same nationality who worked with such agencies to supply them with cheap labor,” El Jazouli explains. “These workers don’t have a formal contract or, in many cases, any idea of what agency they are working for but are just told they are picking fruit at this or that location by their capo.”
In three raids in Baix Cinca this summer, police had to rescue 280 migrants from situations of severe exploitation; a further seven police operations broke up networks elsewhere in Spain. “These are the most extreme cases in which coercion and debt entrapment are used to keep migrants in conditions tantamount to forced labor but you then also have a lot of informal recruiters paying undocumented workers a poverty wage for long hours [as was the case with the Pakistani man who died],” notes Casal.
“He was only trying to earn a crust for his family,” El Jazouli argues. “He was married with a son back home in Pakistan and arrived in Spain having been smuggled in via Turkey last year.” he continues. “But instead of a meager crust, his family has now received a corpse.”
Nor is he likely to be the last such victim, as climate breakdown compounds yet further the harsh realities faced by migrant workers.
Great Job Eoghan Gilmartin & the Team @ Jacobin Source link for sharing this story.
