It’s the end of May and the road leading to Manolada, a small village about 180 miles southwest of Athens in Greece’s Peloponnese region, is adorned with the pink bloom of oleanders. The sun is shining, and it’s 95 degrees Fahrenheit. The air is rich with the smell of the village’s prized fruit. Manolada’s strawberries are world-famous, and signs on both sides of the road boast of this fact.
In 2019, Greece ranked as the world’s eighth-largest exporter of strawberries and the third fastest-growing exporter since 2015. Revenue amounted to $62 million in 2019 alone. Ninety percent of the country’s strawberries are produced in Manolada, and about 90% of the men harvesting them are migrants.
Home to 2,000 permanent residents, Manolada stands out from the rest of the Greek countryside. Among its traditional Greek grocery stores, bakeries and tavernas, you see many shops with signs in Bengali. Driving through Manolada and the nearby villages, you come across many groups of Bangladeshi men, most of them farmhands who work the strawberry fields.
Neither the Greek state nor the afentiko (boss) care about our lives or health. Only our cheap labour matters," says Ahmed*, an undocumented Bangladeshi migrant strawberry picker.
In Greece, the strawberry growing season, over for this year, has left a bad taste in the mouths of the over 8,000 undocumented Bangladeshi migrant men who are the bedrock of this sector.
In early March 2020, Greece was one of the first European countries to announce a stringent country-wide lockdown to prevent the spread of COVID-19. The lockdown, coming right in the middle of harvest season, hit the Greek commercial strawberry sector and its daily-wage pickers hard as the movement of harvested fruit ground to a total halt for 10 days. When production did resume again, it was on a smaller scale due to diminished local and international demand.
With another strawberry growing season set to begin in late October, reflecting on the experience of undocumented strawberry workers is crucial.
Over 90 percent of Greece’s strawberry agribusiness is clustered in a small region commonly known as Manolada, located around the villages of Nea Manolada and Lappa in western Peloponnese. Almost all seasonal labour here is provided by 10,000–12,000 undocumented Bangladeshi men.
Neither the pandemic nor the emergency measures to protect public health have improved the working and living conditions of the many thousands of land workers in the greater Manolada area. On the contrary: the well-known problems of recent years have now been exacerbated by the lack of work due to the reduction in exports and growing fear of the coronavirus in a territory that has been forgotten by all. In the following video, the primarily Bangladeshi agricultural workers in Manolada explain, politely and with dignity, these problems, which are expected to worsen in this year’s growing season between now and the summer.
In particular, there has been absolutely no improvement in the living conditions of the migrant workers in the area, although the well-publicized decision of the European Court of Human Rights to convict Greece in 2017 explicitly stipulated that change was necessary. Workers remain exposed to cold and dampness in the winter, and unbearable heat and a suffocating atmosphere in the spring and summer while living next to rubbish bins. The lack of drinking water and proper toilets aggravates an already inhumane living environment in slums that, in some cases, are located just a few dozen meters away from the village’s main square.
At the same time, the workers must meet various obligations while their wages shrink. On the one hand, they have to pay “rent” and other living expenses in the Manolada ghetto. On the other, they are expected to send remittances to cover the needs of their families in their countries of origin. Unexpectedly, given the ban on the entry of seasonal agricultural workers mainly from Albania due to the lockdown, the Manolada workers and all permanently settled foreign workers in the country are gradually becoming essential for the cultivation and harvesting of crops across Greece.
In light of this lack of manpower, the state, in a spirit of genuine hypocrisy, not only avoids the question of legitimizing the employment status of these workers, but is further elaborating the framework for their extreme exploitation. Citing the extraordinary circumstances, the New Democracy government has used, through the Act of Legislative Content of 13 April 2020, the regulatory framework of the slave-like and forced labour of article 13A, which the Syriza government added to Law 4251/2014 to extend the six-month work permits (but not residence permits) on the strength alone of a statutory declaration by the employer, remove the role of the decentralized administrations in issuing permits by concentrating all responsibilities in the local police departments, and suspend the requirement to submit employment contracts and proof of the provision of appropriate accommodation, even for new licenses to be issued by 30 June.
The strawberry season has already begun, and at least 7,000 harvesters from Bangladesh are currently in Manolada. While agricultural production has decreased due to COVID-19, difficult living and working conditions raise further concerns.
At around 10pm; this is when Rahmad will know if he is working tomorrow or not.
That’s the time when the “mastur”, his fellow compatriot who acts as a mediator for Rahmad and dozens others of Bangladeshis under his supervision, will have talked with the “afentiko”, the Greek producer, and will know how many people will be needed in the strawberry fields the next morning.
Day labour in Manolada has been declining recently. Fewer days are available, with reduced working hours.
Rahmad, who came to Greece two years ago and has been working in the strawberry fields of western Ilia ever since, has lately worked sometimes three, sometimes four hours. Some days he has not worked at all.
“Things here lately are very bad,” he told Solomon MAG on Wednesday, April 1. He had just returned from the field after four hours of work, for which he is to receive €14 (€3.5 per hour).
That same night, before going to bed, Rahmad received a text message. The boss did have a job for him tomorrow. How many hours? “Come tomorrow and we’ll see.”
Since COVID-19 has led to reduction of production, field workers are now informed whether there is work for them the night before.
Where overcrowding cannot be avoided
As part of its efforts to curb the spread of COVID-19 in Greece, on March 18, 2020, during the daily press briefing by Health Ministry spokesman Sotiris Tsiodras and Deputy Minister of Civil Protection Nikos Hardalias, Greek government announced a ban on public, outdoor gatherings of 10 or people. The measure went into effect the very next day.
Hardalias added that, at the same time, gatherings of 10 or more people for recreational purposes are now also discouraged. Three days later, on March 21, 2020, the Greek Police released a video in which it called on Greek citizens, as well as non-Greeks who live or are in the country, to avoid overcrowding.
Each growing season, from October to May, as many as 12,000 undocumented Bangladeshi migrant men work in the agrarian labor market in Greece.
Although they consider Greece a transit stop to other European countries, most end up staying for years. The migrant farm workers say the farmers reap rich profits but are so far unwilling to provide decent housing for them. Nor can the seasonal workers find local accommodation.
The workers are forced to rent unused farmland and build highly inflammable makeshift shacks called barangas. Baranga is a Bangladeshi colloquial term derived from a Greek word, paranga, which translates as "a shack." Workers construct the barangas out of salvaged plastic sheets, cardboard and reeds.
Greece is the 10th biggest exporter of strawberries in the world. Strawberry farming is labor-intensive. Once picked, the fruit perishes quickly. This puts a huge demand on the fast-paced yet careful harvest of unblemished strawberries. Migrant workers form the backbone of this farming, and it's work that locals appear unwilling to do.
I arrived in the village of Nea Manolada, Greece this past summer to research Bangladeshi migrant men working on strawberry farms. Since 2017, I have studied temporary labor migration of South Asian men from Bangladesh, India and Pakistan in Greece.
It was April of 2013, when Greece and the international press were shocked by thenews that about thirty migrant workers were shot by the supervisors of the strawberry fields where they had been working in Manolada, Peloponese, after asking for six months’ worth of unpaid wages. More than a year later, at the end of July 2014, the trial of the four farmers involved concluded. Two of them, including the owner of the farm, also charged for human trafficking, were acquitted; two were found guilty of serious bodily harm and abetting serious bodily harm from neglect and received sentences of fourteen years and seven months and eight years and seven months respectively, but were freed pending appeal. In other words, no one is being punished for the shooting of twenty-eight people.
In the small Greek town of Nea Manolada, the smell of strawberries fills the air. Located in the region of Ilia in the western Peloponnese, a large number of enterprises occupy hundreds of hectares of land for intensive greenhouse cultivation. With a turnover of more than 90 million euros, strawberry production covers the largest part (up to 95%) of the Greek market, while 70% is exported to countries such as Russia, Germany and the UK, among others.
Idyllic posters of the plump red fruit can be found on every street corner, and spotting excessively luxurious villas is not a difficult task. In 2011, in the midst of Greece’s sagging economy, former “Socialist” Prime Minister George Papandreou praised farm owners for their bold entrepreneurial spirit and agricultural innovation. But at what — and most importantly at whose — cost is the so-called Manolada “miracle” sustained?
