90 min ARD,ARTE | DoP
Germany, Greece, Portugal, Spain, Italy, France, Luxembourg
Director: Elke Sasse
Production: Berlin Producers Media GmbH
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!”
