We want cheap fruit and vegetables all year. No problem. The Pickers deliver, but they are paying the price for us: Exploited migrants harvest our oranges, strawberries, olives, blueberries and other fruit and vegetables in Greece, Spain, Italy or Portugal. This is not “somewhere else”. This is Europe. These 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 to agents. But it doesn't have to be this way.

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!”