The Salmon and the Tomato

By Neal Haddaway

Salmon and tomatoes are now staple features on supermarket shelves across the world, even in the middle of winter, when salmon are spawning in rivers and annual tomato crops have withered and died.

What were once luxuries are now available at low cost throughout the year. Both salmon farming and greenhouse horticulture present this as a success story, but beyond profit accumulation for a shrinking number of multinationals, this is far from a triumph.

Norway alone produces more than 1.2 million tonnes of farmed salmon each year, and beyond the local organic and chemical pollution, it is well-documented that many fish die in such farms before they can even be consumed.

More hidden from view, however, is the impact of salmon farming on the decline of fisheries in West Africa. Salmon need wild fish as feed, and salmon farming in Norway (the main producing country) has been linked to the removal of edible fish from Mauritania, Senegal and the Gambia, where up to 80 per cent of people depend on pelagic fish for protein.

As fisheries have collapsed, the food and livelihoods of coastal communities in West Africa have disappeared. Many people, mostly young men, have felt a strong push to travel to Europe in search of income to support their families. In 2024, almost 50,000 people travelled thousands of kilometres in small wooden fishing boats to the Canary Islands, and from there to mainland Spain.

As many as one in five people die on this route, but those who survive often head to the south-eastern province of Almería looking for work. Here, they join around 100,000 workers, mostly migrants, tending to a more than 3billion Euro industry of greenhouse crops that are primarily exported to supermarkets in Germany, France and the UK.

The 32,000 hectares of plastic greenhouses are so large that it is visible from space. Working and living conditions are dire, with thousands living in shacks hewn from discarded greenhouse materials. The authorities and police largely turn a blind eye to the illegal employment of undocumented migrants, vital as they are in supporting the local economy. Wage theft and abuse are rife.

This is not an isolated case. It is an example of food imperialism: the control of poorer nations by a wealthy elite through food trade and aid. This control allows the accumulation of profits within the wealthy nations, institutions and corporations whilst extracting resources and opportunities from the Global Majority (Global South). Food imperialism has a long history, explained well through the concept of food regimes; a key characteristic of our current regime is the enhanced role of multinational corporations where previous empires were controlled by nation states.

In the case of salmon farming and tomato greenhouse production, food imperialism manifests itself through a number of ‘plays’: the extraction and destruction of edible fish from West Africa as salmon feed and increasingly the use of soy from Brazil, where deforestation and land conversion is used to create soy monocultures; monopolisation of aquacultural production and fish feed supply chains; aggressive litigation to silence activists and journalists; consolidation of supermarket power over wholesale horticultural prices; deliberate stabilisation of consumer pricing despite yield fluctuations; and vertical monopolisation of supply chains and direct procurement and sale, to name just a few.

The resulting impacts have knock-on effects up and down the supply chains that disproportionately affect more marginalised and less resilient people. For example, low wholesale prices and high aesthetic standards for fruit and vegetables, along with static pricing in the face of yield loss, cause financial instability and losses for the 15,000 families who own greenhouses in Almería. These costs are passed on to greenhouse workers who, without sufficiently legislated or strictly enforced rights, are subject to wage theft, low salaries, precarious working contracts, dangerous working environments, and insanitary living conditions. Once they obtain documents and residency, migrant workers typically move to better-paid and more secure jobs, creating a continuous demand for undocumented labour in the region.

In West Africa, Almería is renowned as the easiest place in Europe to work without papers. This pull has resulted in large numbers of people who, on arrival, are unable to find work or accommodation, with many West Africans sharing jobs and left homeless, particularly in towns like Roquetas de Mar, within the so-called Sea of Plastic.

 

Challenging Food Imperialism

These are complex and wicked problems but solutions exist. Some are immediate, transitional, and incremental; others are more radical, transformational, and systemic. Both are necessary.

Using a food imperialism lens, the architects of our food system are nation states and corporations who (have) work(ed) in concert to structure international trade in favour of profit-making in the Global North and offshoring externalities in the Global South.

In light of this power dynamic and the concentrated nature of agrifood business (four multinationals  own half of the global seed market), the most impactful and evident leverage point for solutions relies on radical change in policy and corporate norms.

Radical solutions include governments and international institutions embracing:

• Degrowth - moving towards a less wasteful society, lower consumption, and an emphasis on local production and drastically shortened food supply chains.
• Food sovereignty - the involvement of workers and peasant movements in global and national food system governance and the rejection of detrimental foreign interests in the Global South (for example, as Guinea-Bissau has banned the fishmeal industry).
• Agroecology and seed sovereignty - moving towards low dependency on inputs (seeds, fertilisers, pesticides) in arable farming and encouraging sustainable and safe food production in line with a multi-dimensional definition of food security that includes recognition of people’s agency as consumers and producers and the concept of producing food sustainably.

Solutions should also involve the strengthening of existing policies, including that:

• Importer nations and international institutions should ensure full supply chain transparency to allow for detailed and easy investigation of the exact source of products, whilst also ensuring that there are policies and platforms to enforce accountability for criminal activities in their supply chains.
• Workers’ and migrants’ rights and safety should be demonstrably assured by producer nations to ensure fair wages and safe working environments for agri-food labourers. Regularisation of vital workers, as recently happened in Spain, can both improve livelihoods and reduce pull for further irregular migration, but only in concert with minimum wage policing to avoid creating a conveyor belt of regularised workers.
• Food waste should be prohibited across the supply chain, which means national policies penalising food waste (for example, with supermarkets in France) but extending this approach across supply chains to include on-farm waste which is a critical problem in intensive agricultural systems like the horticultural greenhouse in Almería.

Other important solutions include certification schemes which span supply chains and are meaningful (that is, not self-policed); and democratic governance of food-facing resources like water (including monitoring and policing) and support for NGOs acting in institutional spaces without institutional support, such as food waste hubs.

There also needs to be fairer, more balanced trade: for example, preventing the export of banned pesticides from the EU to countries which then export food to the EU via supply chains from which those pesticides are banned. 

Finally, we must recognise that consumer choice exists within a landscape of alternatives provided by the agrifood industry: sustainable options are typically higher-priced and only ever intended to be a minority market. As a result, consumer choices are not truly democratic, since behavioural change would not result in significant modification of the system as long as cheaper alternatives exist.

A vital additional solution exists for consumers – self-organisation by citizens themselves to demand more sustainable food. Grassroots movements focusing on peasants’ rights, small-scale and sustainable food production and food sovereignty, like Via Campesina, are growing. Perhaps the most valuable action we can take, not only for a fairer food system but for our own mental wellbeing, is to have active hope and take action towards these lofty goals.

Food imperialism has been structuring our globalised food system for hundreds of years, and the patterns, pathways, and platforms that maintain it are deeply entrenched in contemporary society and politics.

But capitalism’s cracks are perhaps nowhere more visible than in the quotidian act of buying and preparing food. ”There is nothing more political than food”, to quote the chef and writer Anthony Bourdain. For those of us in the Global North, every meal can be a quiet act of revolution.

 

Dr Neal Haddaway is a researcher and photojournalist from the UK who works on the impacts of agrifood production and food supply chains. His project The Salmon and the Tomato focuses on two connected supermarket staples and their social and ecological ‘externalities’. He is the co-host of the Edible Empire podcast series.