Agricultural Digitalisation, Ecological Transition and Migrant Workers. the Case of the Agri-Food Industry in Murcia.

The increasingly widespread business and institutional initiatives of agricultural digitalisation as a strategy to solve the problems of environmental degradation linked to agriculture tend to neglect the impact on employment. Optimistic views of digitalisation assume that the loss of jobs in agriculture-based activities can be compensated by the creation of more qualified and better paid jobs in other links of the global agri-food system. However, some studies warn that digitalisation may deepen the existing dynamics of inequality and the consolidation of a redundant population without access to occupations to sustain their livelihoods (Goodman, 2023). Based on the socio-environmental conflict in the Mar Menor, whose contamination derives from nitrate discharges from intensive agriculture in the Region of Murcia, and drawing on documentary sources and interviews with the main actors in the sector and society, we offer a preliminary analysis of the way in which the strategies of agricultural digitalisation applied by producers are articulated with the conflict associated with the dynamics of labour, gender and ethnic inequality. We ask whether digital productive transformations carried out in the name of nature can contribute to intensifying the control and exploitation of migrant workers. And whether, in so doing, it may also contribute to alienating workers from aspirations for ecological transition or, on the contrary, to contesting the meaning of environmental sustainability in line with social justice and labour dignity.