Film Screening The Pickers (2024) with discussion

One Million migrants harvest Europe’s fields, picking the fruit and vegetables that we buy in European supermarkets. Most of them work and live in precarious conditions. We want cheap fruit and veg, all year. No problem. The Pickers deliver, but they are paying the price for us.

The Pickers is a journey to European fields where our fruit and vegetables are grown: in Southern Italy, Seydou from Mali is picking oranges. He has no contract and is paid per crate. He lives in a self-built hut in a settlement without water and electricity.

Blueberries in Portugal, olives in Greece, strawberries in Spain – one million migrants are currently working in European fields. The pickers are the mobile workforce that fills our supermarkets’ baskets, most of them without contracts or minimum wages, some without papers or with high debts with agents.

What we see adds a bitter taste to what we eat every day: Our daily fruit and vegetables are rooted in a system of exploitation.

No way out of this system? There is: Pape from Senegal is producing fair oranges in southern Italy: “We don’t want to be seen as revolutionary, we want this to be the new normal!”

Please join us for a screening, followed by discussion with the PEAT (The Political Ecology of Agrarian Transitions) research group at Lancaster Environment Centre. Tickets are free but with the option to donate to Mediterranean Hope's Dambe So, House of Dignity, which provides and campaigns for fair accommodation for harvest workers/pickers in Calabria.

Host or Publisher Many Worlds On Film