How sustainable are tomatoes? | DW Documentary

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Delicious, sweet, low in calories: Tomatoes have a good reputation. They’re the most important vegetable in the world, with a total production of 190 million tons per year. But how sustainable is their cultivation?

Almería, Spain, supplies Europe with fresh vegetables all year round. But the place known as the vegetable garden of Europe looks more like a sea of plastic: greenhouse plantations cover an area the size of 45,000 soccer pitches, stretching to the horizon. The tomato is a diva: it can’t get too warm, or too cold and doesn’t like too much direct sunlight.

Watering must also be carefully controlled and the plastic coverings help with this. A blessing for tomato lovers, but a curse for others: Marcos Diéguez from the Spanish environmental protection organization "Ecologistas en Acción” has been fighting the flood of plastic for years. Only around a third of the plastic is disposed of properly, he explains. The rest ends up in one of the many illegal garbage dumps in the region.

And plastic isn’t the only problem: Tomato farming is labor-intensive and corners are often cut on wages. In the morning hours, the streets of Almería are full. Men, mainly from North Africa, stand on the roadsides hoping for work.

For these people, every day is a struggle, says Miguel Carmona from the SOC-SAT Almería trade union. The harvest workers often have no documents or employment contracts. They live in makeshift shelters, built from scraps of wood and discarded greenhouse tarpaulins. No electricity, no running water, no sanitary facilities. In the middle of Europe.

The documentary explores the question of how tomato production can become more sustainable. New, more robust varieties should help. Some tomato producers are also trying to use geothermal energy in greenhouses for climate-friendly cultivation.

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