Mass eviction of farm workers in southern Spain

Eviction targets migrant agricultural workers in crucial UK supermarket supply region

In February 2025, around 60 people living at the informal settlement in El Uno, including nine children, were forced out of their homes after the owner of the land was granted an eviction order.

And despite providing services to clear the makeshift housing from the land, according to reports the local town council in Nijar has refused to find alternative accommodation for the community, referring to the displacement as a dispute between private individuals.

Many of the residents, who work long hours to grow tomatoes and other fresh produce in a region that supplies all the major UK supermarkets are now homeless or in uncertain housing. 

El Pais reported that bulldozers tore down the informal settlement homes – built with plastics and pallets salvaged from the greenhouses where the residents work – within minutes.

Outside, the former occupants had piled up the few belongings they could carry with them to their workplaces – blankets, clothes bags, fans, tools, and fridges.

They left behind boxes of possessions, drums, hangers, a Peppa Pig sticker and a toy cook, the paper said. 

The children at the settlement, the youngest of whom is two and a half years old, all attend local schools. 

Some residents have moved to provisional housing provided by local NGOs, while others have moved out of the area.

But many of those still looking for housing have resorted to sleeping on nearby floors and roofs. Local authorities have provided no alternative housing. And they have struggled to secure rental accommodation in the area due to the reluctance of local landlords to lease their properties to migrant workers.

"We've been looking for a house for weeks, but there's nothing to rent," one of the former residents, Abdoul, 33, told the paper.  

The Ombudsman of Andalucía, which is responsible for overseeing human rights standards in the area, issued a request for the council of Nijar to provide alternative housing for evictees, noting that they were “extremely vulnerable families.”

A local union SOC-SAT Almería, and human rights organisations including Anti-Slavery International and Ethical Consumer are also calling for supermarkets across the UK and Europe to intervene on behalf of the displaced farm workers and their families, due to the high likelihood that some of these workers are either currently, or have previously, been employed on farms within their supply chains.

Adrià Cots Fernández, Business and Human Rights Partnerships Coordinator at Anti-Slavery International said:

“Everybody must be able to live in safety and dignity. Regardless of where someone lives and the job they do, nobody should be forced from their home. 

“UK supermarkets must use their leverage with suppliers to make sure that workers whose labour sustains our food system have safe and adequate housing, starting with the families evicted last week in Nijar.”

Lack of supermarket action

“UK supermarkets are fully aware that lots of their suppliers are located in Almería and Nijar, and there's a high chance that the evictees have worked picking vegetables and fruit that have helped stock their shelves,” said Jasmine Owens at Ethical Consumer. “Yet they turn a blind eye to the flagrant human rights abuses that these people endure, and keep buying the produce, even though there's so much more they could do with their influence, such as demanding that farm owners provide safe and suitable homes (and ensuring supermarkets are paying enough to make this realistic), or publicly lobbying the local or national government to provide adequate housing."

In November 2024, the Njiar town council drastically reduced the water and electricity supply in a different settlement of farmworkers which hosts hundreds of workers and their families.

Ethical Consumer and 18 civil society organisations and unions including Anti-Slavery International, Landworkers’ Alliance, Focus on Labour Exploitation (FLEX), and Asociación Amigos del SOC responded by publishing an open letter, asking local authorities to address the water stoppages at the community. While the letter gained attention in the Spanish media, the local council has yet to restore full access to the water, and denied claims by workers that it cut access to this amenity at the settlement.

The letter also asked supermarkets to call on the local council to restore access to water, given the possibility that some workers in the settlement form part of their supply chain. All of the major UK supermarkets have responded to the letter on the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre website, pointing to various sustainability initiatives they have introduced. But none of these organisations agreed to take meaningful action such as publicly contacting the Spanish authorities, which would increase the pressure on the authorities to act.

According to a report in 2022 by the local NGO Andalucia Acoge, there are 42 informal settlements in Nijar alone, housing up to 1,200 regular residents. The Plataforma Derecho a Techo (The Right to Shelter Platform) estimates that there are between 3,000 and 4,000 day workers living in precarious conditions in the region.

Twenty-five years ago, local authorities and large employers in the region pledged to address these housing problems. But they have so far taken no action to improve the living conditions of their employees.

The Plataforma Derecho a Techo is staging a protest to improve housing conditions for day labourers in the region on April 13, 2025.