The era of cheap tomatoes from Spain may be over

Tomato seeds can cost growers upwards of €1 per seed depending on the breeder and variety. Swissinfo/Anand Chandrasekhar

Spain is the top source of imported fruit and vegetables in Swiss supermarkets. However, higher wages, tighter regulations and competition from outside Europe are eroding its dominance.

The A-7 highway, also known as the Mediterranean highway, hugs the eastern part of the Costa del Sol in southern Spain beloved by British and German holidaymakers and retirees. Rental cars and taxis ferrying them to the seaside resorts and second home residential complexes built during the real estate boom of the 2000s must share the highway with trucks transporting fruit and vegetables to the rest of Europe.

Around 95% of Spain’s fruit and vegetable exports are transported by trucks. In 2025, this added up to 12.6 million tonnes out of 13.2 million tonnes of exports of fresh produce. Anand Chandrasekhar / SWI swissinfo.ch

Halfway between Malaga and Almeria, the beaches and resorts give way to patches of plastic greenhouses squeezed between the arid hills and the sea. Just within reach of Almeria lies the town of El Ejido. Perched like an island among 13,000 hectares of plastic greenhouses, it is the posterchild of Spanish supremacy in tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers.

El Ejido is the epicentre of the mar de plástico (plastic sea) that covers nearly 40,000 hectares (4.5 times the size of the city of Zurich) of the Campo de Dalias coastal plain in Almeria province, making it the largest concentration of plastic greenhouses in the world. According to the Spanish agricultural ministry, over 16,000 such greenhouses produce about 40% of the fresh vegetables consumed in Europe during the autumn and winter. Spain accounted for a third of Swiss vegetables imports in 2025.

Cheap labour and near-perfect weather guarantee Europe with a steady flow of out-of-season vegetables at prices no other country can compete with. For example, in 2025 the average farmgate price of vine tomatoes from Spain was €91.41 (CHF84.30) per 100kg compared to €120.49/100kg for Belgian ones. The difference is more pronounced in the colder months.

But the system reliant on cheap immigrant labour could be coming to an end. Farmers are pressured by an increase in wages on one end and supermarkets who want to both keep prices down and ensure equitable labour conditions on the other. They are also facing scrutiny from consumers worried about levels of pesticides

Intensive cultivation

José Antonio Cánovas Zafra is a fourth-generation vegetable and fruit grower who manages 1,500 hectares of farmland in Almeria, as well as Murcia, Alicante and Albacete. His company Kernel Exports sells fruit and vegetables all over Europe, including to Swiss supermarkets. About 80% of his sales are via fixed price contracts per season agreed in advance, but he can also grow specific produce on demand.

“Everyone wants to talk about sustainability but still see very low prices on the supermarket shelves,” says fourth generation Spanish grower José Antonio Cánovas Zafra. Anand Chandrasekhar/Swissinfo

“A Swiss supermarket had a deficit of organic apricots, and we planted 65 hectares to meet their needs. Another Swiss retailer no longer wanted to source beans from Morocco, and we grow organic beans for them,” he told Swissinfo.

Zafra’s company employs 250 workers on its farmland. Many are South American or Moroccan, but most are Indians and Pakistanis who migrated to Spain to work on construction sites during the real estate boom in the 2000s and had to find alternative employment after the market crashed in 2008.

“The minimum wage has gone up by over 30% in the last five years. We don’t just compete with produce from Europe but also with South America, North Africa, South Africa and Eastern Europe where labour costs less than half of what we pay here,” he says.

According to Spanish trade union Comisiones Obreras, the pay gap between migrant workers and Spanish ones dropped from 38.2% in 2022 to 29.1% currently. According to the union, this improvement was largely due to increases in the minimum wage, which disproportionately benefits migrant workers, who are more likely to be employed in lower-paid jobs.

Spain’s hourly labour cost is still one of the most competitive in Europe. At €26.40/hour it is still lower than the EU average (€34.90) and main competitors Italy (€32) or the Netherlands (€47.90), according to Eurostat.

But supermarkets are not willing to pass on higher production costs to their consumers. Despite relationships spanning decades with supermarkets around Europe, Zafra is always under pressure to deliver quality produce at low prices as supermarkets are keen to protect their margins. He told Swissinfo that a supermarket (that he did not wish to name) refused his request for CHF0.04 increase in the price of melons contracted for CHF0.62 per kilo due to inflation caused by the Iran war.

“After two weeks of negotiations, we only got a CHF0.025 increase. For a supermarket CHF0.04 is peanuts, but for us it can make the difference between being able to survive or losing money,” he says.

Pesticide regulations

Besides labour issues, consumers and supermarkets are also wary about pesticides in Spanish produce after past scares. In the 2006-2007 season, Almeria’s reputation was hit after higher-than-recommended levels of pesticide residues were found in peppers from the region, including banned organophosphate pesticide isofenphos-methyl. Supermarkets across Europe stopped stocking peppers from Almeria for weeks and exports of Spanish peppers dropped by 20%.

Along with tomatoes, peppers are the mainstay of Almeria’s agricultural exports. Swissinfo/Anand Chandrasekhar

According to the 2025 Eurobarometer on Food Safety in the EU, consumers who were asked about problems or risks associated with food mentioned chemical contaminants the most (28%), followed by additives (17%), quality (14%) and cost (12%). When quizzed further about specific food safety topics they were aware of, pesticide residues in food (39%) and antibiotic, hormone or steroid residues in meat (36%) topped the list of food safety-related concerns.

Heeding consumer concerns, the EU has cut the number of authorised active substances in pesticides from over 1,000 to around 500 (of which 25% are low risk) in the last 25 years. This has meant that Spanish fruit and vegetable growers have access to fewer chemicals to sustain their intensive form of agriculture. Supermarkets are also setting their own pesticide standards that often go beyond EU requirements.

“European law is not enough for our customers, and each one is making their own protocol in terms of active substances and maximum residue levels in produce. We cannot spray, we cannot control the aphids, and the biggest challenge is to achieve the same quality with the limited tools we have,” says Zafra.

Billboards in Almeria are more likely to advertise services and products for the fruit and vegetable industry than real estate or fashion. Anand Chandrasekhar / SWI swissinfo.ch

When contacted, Swiss supermarket chains Coop and Migros confirmed they go beyond the minimum legal standards in Switzerland and the EU. They have their own list of banned active substances but also require the cumulative pesticide load to be low.

“There are specific limits on multiple residues per product group, meaning that only a restricted number of plant protection product residues may be detected in product – even if the individual substances are below the legal maximum residue levels,” wrote a Migros representative.

Swiss supermarket standards also go beyond the greenhouse. For example, they can extend to post-harvest treatment, processing, storage and transport.

“A key difference is that Coop does not merely assess individual statutory maximum residue limits but defines additional requirements throughout the entire supply chain,” wrote a Coop representative.

Investing in pest and disease resistance

To address the decrease in chemical options available to its growers, Spain is pushing alternative solutions such as developing more resistant plant varieties. This strategy is one of the reasons why Swiss agricultural technology company Syngenta decided to invest in a new $10 million (CHF8 million) R&D Technology Center in El Ejido, Almeria right in the middle of the “plastic sea” of greenhouses. Syngenta researchers hope to identify emerging diseases in fields and greenhouses with the aim of developing resistant plant varieties in record time.

“Every two years a new plant pathogen emerges. Developing a resistant variety takes years, which means farmers spray more or switch to other crops,” says Uri Krieger, Global Head of R&D for Syngenta Vegetable Seeds.

Typically, adding a new trait such as disease resistance to a commercial variety through the conventional method of backcrossing takes six to seven years. Syngenta can speed up the process to just three to four years by identifying the most promising plants based on pre-selected traits, using genetic markers and field performance data. Syngenta is also looking at breeding instead of chemicals because it costs the company about $300 million and 12 years to come up with a new commercially viable pesticide.

Swiss agricultural technology company Syngenta’s brand new $10 million R&D Technology Center in El Ejido will develop more disease resistant plant varieties. Syngenta

Automation could save the day

One way Almeria’s growers are trying keep production costs low is automation. Vicasol, a local cooperative that counts over 1,000 growers as members and handles 90,000 tonnes of tomatoes a year, has invested €6 million of its own capital over the past three years on automation for tomatoes alone. This includes sorting systems with artificial intelligence and multispectral cameras for quality analysis, robotic arms to load and unload fruit from pallets and automated guided vehicles (AGVs), which can transport and keep track of produce in the warehouse.

Around 80% of the cooperative’s tomatoes are exported to countries including Germany, France, Poland, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Winter is peak season for Vicasol, and its warehouse operates round the clock this time of year.

Vicasol did not share information on the cost savings it has achieved through its investment in automation. According to French automation company MAF RODA, whose systems have been installed in Vicasol, projects are highly custom-made and outcomes depend on each project’s characteristics and the initial level of warehouse automation.

“Some clients have reduced staffing on a pre-sizing line from 30 people to managing the entire warehouse with only five people per shift. This represents an approximate 33% annual reduction in labour costs,” says María Cabello, director of marketing and communications at MAF RODA.

According to Cabello, the investment in automation will pay for itself within two-and-a-half to four years. With an expected lifespan of ten to 15 years, recovering the investment within this timeframe is almost guaranteed. But beyond cost savings, automation also increases warehouse flexibility, particularly in enabling a wide variety of packing configurations to be handled automatically, says Cabello.

At the farm level, however, adoption of automation of agriculture is still very low in Europe, with Spain trailing behind peers. A study commissioned by the European Commission in 2025 showed that Spain was behind only Ireland (40%) when it came to the share of non-adopters of digital technologies in the farm (36% versus 4% for leader Poland).

Spain’s Strategic Plan for the Sustainable Development of Agriculture 2023–2027 under the EU Common Agriculture Policy (CAP) has earmarked €1.5 billion for adoption of precision agriculture and digital farming technologies. This includes subsidies for farmers to adopt smart irrigation, monitoring and digital decision-support tools. However, this is only around 3% of CAP funding of almost €48 billion for this period.

“Digitalisation is needed for farmers to become more accurate in decision making. Our farmers are resilient, but resilience cannot be an excuse for a lack of action,” says Francisco Góngora Cara, mayor of El Ejido.

Edited by Virginie Mangin/ts