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# The Global Greenhouse Boom: Emerging Geographies of Agri-Food Intensification in the Plantationocene

Karl S. Zimmerer<sup>1,2,3,4</sup> | Martha G. Bell<sup>5</sup>

<sup>1</sup>Department of Geography, Programs in Rural Sociology and Ecology, and the GeoSyntheSES Collaboratory, Pennsylvania State University, State College, Pennsylvania, USA | <sup>2</sup>MAK'IT Visiting Scientist Program, University of Montpellier, Montpellier, France | <sup>3</sup>CEFE, CNRS, EPHE, IRD, Montpellier, France | <sup>4</sup>AGAP, CIRAD, Montpellier, France | <sup>5</sup>Geography and the Environment, Department of Humanities, Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, Lima, Peru

**Correspondence:** Karl S. Zimmerer (ksz2@psu.edu)

**Received:** 27 August 2024 | **Revised:** 7 February 2025 | **Accepted:** 31 March 2025

**Funding:** The authors received no specific funding for this work.

**Keywords:** agri-food systems | agricultural intensification | extended urbanization | global greenhouse boom | Plantationocene | sociotechnical assemblages | volumetric enclosures

## ABSTRACT

The global greenhouse boom is central to the accelerating intensification of agri-food systems. Perspectives and principles of critical agrarian studies, the Plantationocene, and environment-society geography are used to offer a novel approach to the global greenhouse boom. Case studies of leading greenhouse countries (Spain, China, Morocco, Mexico) illustrate distinctive dynamics that have developed during recent decades. The perspectives and case studies are used to suggest insights and themes for future research. These center on the volumetric enclosures of the greenhouse boom, sociotechnical assemblages linked to long-distance market chains through transportation networks and new infrastructure, agrarian transformations of rural depopulation and national-international labor migration, spatial clustering fueled by land and water rushes that concentrate on the periurban territory of extended urbanization, and the marginalized food systems and precarity of greenhouse workers. Insights from the global greenhouse boom suggest the disruption of prevailing ideas of the geographic trajectories of global land-use intensification. The emergent new geographies of the global greenhouse boom abound with timely opportunities and well-suited challenges for future geographic research that is engaged with sustainability and justice.

## 1 | Introduction

Greenhouse facilities for agri-food production—in which cropping occurs in glass or plastic-covered structures—have expanded globally to cover between 1.3 and 3.0 million hectares (Ou and Wang 2022; Jiménez-Lao et al. 2020; Tong et al. 2024). Accelerating during the past 2 decades, the expansion of greenhouse areas is concentrated in China, Spain, Italy, Mexico, Turkey, Morocco, South Korea, Japan, Netherlands, and France. These 10 countries account for more than 90% of the total worldwide area of greenhouse production.

Greenhouse areas are also expanding in such varied places as Peru, Vietnam, Jamaica, and Canada (Acharki and Veettil 2023; Bell et al. 2023; Jiménez-Lao et al. 2020; Moulton 2017). We argue that the ample evidence of these rapid worldwide increases is indicative of a “global greenhouse boom” even as the greenhouse types and their characteristics vary significantly among and within these countries (Moulton 2017).

Our argument for the global greenhouse boom is motivated by the massive new wave of global agri-food intensification that encompasses aquaponics, hydroponics, large-scale vertical

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growing systems, intensive urban farming, confined animal
production, and other spatially concentrated agri-food intensi-
fication. As such, the greenhouse boom along with these other
trends are increasingly invoked in vigorous and urgent scientific
and policy calls for sustainable food systems and agri-food
intensification (Burney et al. 2010; De Witte et al. 2023; W.
Wu et al. 2018; Tscharntke et al. 2022), in addition to the closely
related environment-society issues of global biodiversity con-
servation, food security, sustainable development, and the ad-
aptations of agri-food systems to climate change (Forkuor
et al. 2022; Goddek et al. 2023; Tomaselli et al. 2020; Tong
et al. 2024; Zimmerer and McSweeney 2020).

The goals of this study are to understand the global greenhouse
boom by (1) highlighting principal environment-society per-
spectives from critical agrarian studies, the Plantationocene, and
related concepts; (2) illustrating these perspectives in brief case
studies; and (3) suggesting key insights and themes for future
research in geography and related fields.

2 | Environment-Society Geography Perspectives on the Global Greenhouse Boom

We highlight five perspectives as steps toward a conceptual
framework to advance the analysis of the global greenhouse
boom through environment-society geography (Zimmerer and
McSweeney 2020). These perspectives engage the scholarship of
critical agrarian studies and the Plantationocene, political
ecology of industrial agriculture, sociotechnical assemblages,
labor conditions and precarity including workers' food strate-
gies, and land and water systems involving agri-food intensifi-
cation. We argue these environment-society perspectives are
central to understanding the global greenhouse boom while
acknowledging the importance of various elements beyond the
scope of this study that are discussed below (Section 4).

Critical agrarian studies has outlined a geographic perspective
on the Plantationocene that is central in our study (Borras and
Franco 2023; Carney 2021; Chao et al. 2024; Davis et al. 2019;
Wolford 2021; Zimmerer et al. 2023). It treats agricultural
intensification as an environment-society process shaped
through the entanglements of multi-scale supply chains, land
access, and racialized labor exploitation (Kelley 2020; Wil-
liams 2023; Wolford 2021). Plantationocene studies from this
perspective have focused on industrial monocultures and their
plantation precursors as the sites of social struggles over re-
sources; land; and racialized labor regimes ranging from slavery
to the exploitation of peasants, indigenous, and other margin-
alized groups (Carney 2021; Wolford 2021; Zimmerer et al. 2023;
Zimmerer 2025). Racialized labor and food struggles distinguish
the contemporary Plantationocene amid agrarian trans-
formation that suggest relevance to the global greenhouse boom
(Borras and Franco 2023; Zimmerer, Diez Hurtado, et al. 2024).
Geographic elements identified in Plantationocene research that
are of particular significance here include the concepts of en-
closures, agri-food territorial dynamics, long-distance transport
and market relations, extraction and utilization of resources and
nature, racialized labor conditions and precarity, and farm-
workers' food systems (Barua 2023; Borras and Franco 2023;

Carney 2021; Chao et al. 2024; Davis et al. 2019; Sexsmith 2022;
Wolford 2021; Zimmerer et al. 2020, 2023).

Second, we engage the land and water systems of the global greenhouse boom, with special attention to the industrial agriculture of intensive monocropping and corresponding food-system linkages (Huber 2017; Moseley 2022; Williams 2023). To date, the development of greenhouse-based agri-food intensification has been evaluated as either socio-ecologically destructive (e.g., Entrena-Duran 2015; Maguire et al. 2018; Tscharntke et al. 2022) or beneficial (Aznar-Sánchez et al. 2020; Knapp 2017; Pearce 2024; W. Wu et al. 2018). This unresolved mix of complex and contradictory interpretations urges further analysis of the social-ecological impacts and implications incurred by the global greenhouse boom.

Third, we highlight the perspective of sociotechnical assem-
bages in science-and-technology studies (STS) as integral to
understanding the global greenhouse boom. Sociotechnical as-
semblages of agriculture and food systems incorporate “tech-
nologies, infrastructures, finance and markets, intellectual
property regimes, standards, and policy and governance”
(Montenegro de Wit and Canfield 2024, 386). We argue below
that the key sociotechnical and material assemblages of green-
houses encompass new plastic-film enclosures and infrastruc-
ture. These new sociotechnical assemblages animate agrarian
change (Guthman 2019; Montenegro de Wit and Canfield 2024;
Werner et al. 2022) and thus provide a valuable perspective.
Additionally, the greenhouse boom, like other developments of
the Plantationocene, is characterized by the dual inputs of
“cheap industry” and “cheap nature” (Barua 2023).¹

Fourth, we draw attention to the labor conditions and agency of greenhouse workers that includes their food strategies. Here our environment-society perspective is centered on the relation of the predominant exploitation of farmworker labor in the global greenhouse boom and their actual food practices as “coping strategies utilizing agrarian and culinary knowledge” (Minkoff-Zern 2014, p. 1190, see also Davis et al. 2019; Zimmerer et al. 2020). This perspective highlights the Plantationocene-centered works that reveal the historical-geographic conditions of diverse-food (“agrobiodiversity”) utilization and resilience in both consumption and production, sometimes clandestinely, among various marginalized, subaltern groups ranging from enslaved Africans in the colonial Caribbean and South America to marginalized indigenous and peasant groups (Carney 2021; Zimmerer et al. 2023). This perspective explicitly recognizes the roles of racial, gender, and sexual politics, and of “embodied ecologies” (see discussion in Davis et al. 2019), which are integral to the precarity and agency of workers in the global greenhouse boom.

Finally, geography-centered concepts of land systems related to
global agri-food intensification (Kuemmerle et al. 2013; Mey-
froidt et al. 2018; Zuo et al. 2018) are identified as the fifth
environment-society perspective of our study. Here we note the
significant albeit bifurcated usefulness of the environment-
society perspective of land-system intensification. On the one
hand, it draws attention to the multi-scale trajectories of
this intensification and social-ecological dimensions that
guide the increasingly urgent, high-profile goals of sustainable
intensification and intensification-for-global-biodiversity-conservation among others. On the other hand, as we discuss, the contours of the global greenhouse boom can be seen to disrupt certain common geographic precepts of agricultural intensification. Building on the highlighted environment-society perspectives, together with the brief case studies, we suggest the greenhouse boom is outlining new spatial-geographic trajectories of global agri-food intensification.

## 3 | Overview and Synoptic Country-Level Case Studies of the Global Greenhouse Boom

A greenhouse is defined here as a permanent structure for cultivation with glass or plastic covering and sourced water (Ou and Wang 2022). This broad definition encompasses the immense variation of greenhouse types that, as illustrated in the cases below, range from automated, digital technology-based production to plastic-covered structures that incorporate earthen walls. The four case-study countries (Spain, China, Morocco, Mexico) are currently among the top 10 worldwide in greenhouse area (Tong et al. 2024). Our illustration of these cases begins with the major historical development of greenhouse-based agrifood intensification in Spain in the mid-20th century, followed by surging concentrations in the Global South since the early 2000s. Additionally, Spain and Morocco have been the sites of the authors' field studies (Zimmerer et al. 2020, 2022; Zimmerer, Diez Hurtado, et al. 2024). Also considered is information from other countries with influential trajectories of greenhouse-based intensification that include Ecuador, Indonesia, Italy, Jamaica, Peru, Turkey, Venezuela, and Vietnam (Acharki and Veettil 2023; Bell et al. 2023; Jaimez et al. 2015; Jiménez-Lao et al. 2020; Knapp 2017; Kuswardhani et al. 2013; Moulton 2017; Moulton and Popke 2017; Ou and Wang 2022; Stemmler and Meemken 2023; Tong et al. 2024).

A few key empirical commonalities further distinguish the historical and geographical overview of global greenhouse boom. First, this development often exhibits a high degree of spatial clustering that has developed historically within countries (Acharki and Veettil 2023; Ou and Wang 2022; Tong et al. 2024). Second, the innovative use of plastic-film technology has become predominant. This so-called plasticulture currently comprises more than 95% of greenhouse coverings globally and is especially common in the Global South (Tong et al. 2024). Third, input and production levels are typically higher in most greenhouse systems than in open fields, with yields typically 4–10 times greater although often less in the lowest-cost systems (Kuswardhani et al. 2013).

The following case studies of the global greenhouse boom are analyzed according to a select group of key themes evident in Plantationocene scholarship (Barua 2023; Borras and Franco 2023; Carney 2021; Chao et al. 2024; Davis et al. 2019; Wolford 2021; Zimmerer et al. 2023). Each case briefly synopsizes the historical development of greenhouse enclosures amid agrarian transformation and the spatial-geographic patterning of greenhouse expansion as industrial, sociotechnical assemblages linked to long-distance transport and markets. The case studies then turn to the land systems and water resources

together with the labor conditions and precarity of greenhouse workers that include their marginalized food systems. We note here the limited availability of suitable information in certain cases. For example, ample published research has examined the greenhouse boom in Spain (e.g., Aznar-Sánchez et al. 2020; Tscharntke et al. 2022) whereas available information is more limited for other countries.

### 3.1 | Spain

The first major cluster of modern greenhouse agriculture, and still one of the world's largest, is centered on the periurban Almería region of southeastern Spain that includes the greenhouse-dominated sub-areas of El Ejido and Las Dalias (Tong et al. 2024). The historical growth of this greenhouse cluster was driven by factors that included early plastic-tunnel technology for vegetable production, state-led agrarian colonization under the Franco regime, and developments of groundwater-based drip irrigation (Entrena-Duran 2015). Recent remote sensing estimates that the Almería greenhouse cluster covers 36,104 ha known as the *mar de plástico* ("sea of plastic") (Entrena-Duran 2015; Tong et al. 2024).

Almería greenhouses exported approximately 2,864,211 tons of fresh vegetables and fruit, led by tomatoes, to central-northern Europe and the UK in 2021/22 (Martín-Moreno et al. 2023), via tightly integrated markets and transport networks. Multiscale factors have coalesced historically to drive this massive formative cluster of the global greenhouse boom (Martín-Moreno et al. 2023; Martínez-Valderrama et al. 2024; Zimmerer et al. 2022). These factors include land and freshwater systems for irrigated production, solar exposure and coastal fresh-air replenishment, state-capital coordination and financialization (such as greenhouse lobbying associations and credit unions), long-distance transport, and national and international market chains ensuring movements of goods, labor, and resources.

The resources of Almería's greenhouses became enrolled in sociotechnical assemblages of a historic "land and water rush" in peri-urban Almería and extending extra-regionally. Water, for example, is currently sourced by multiple desalination plants, whose resource flows, financialization, and management span well beyond the Almería greenhouse territory (Martínez-Valderrama et al. 2024; Zimmerer et al. 2022). Likewise, the greenhouse soil, or more precisely the planting medium, is constituted by topsoil and manure that have been extracted from areas outside the greenhouse territory. These inputs are then combined with beach sand and clay in a distinctive mixture known as the sand-plot technique (enarenado; Entrena-Duran 2015; Martínez-Valderrama et al. 2024; see also Wolosin 2008). The sand-plot technique—which derives from deeply-rooted local knowledge and practices predating the greenhouse boom—is often credited as a foundational factor in the Almería greenhouse boom.

Farmworker labor has been crucial to the greenhouse boom in Spain (Zimmerer et al. 2020, 2022). Labor was originally supplied by greenhouse-owning families and Spanish farmworkers from poor agrarian and landless groups including the
accelerating out-migration of rural Spaniards. Then Moroccan immigrants became the primary source of greenhouse labor in conjunction with shifting international migration during the 1990s and 2000s (Aznar Sánchez and Sánchez Picón 2001; Entrena-Duran 2015). By 2010, the estimates of this “foreign population” in the sub-area of El Ejido alone numbered 30,000, comprising approximately one half of greenhouse workers (Entrena-Duran 2015). By 2020, Almería greenhouse production was increasingly dependent on low-wage immigrant labor from West Africa (e.g., Senegal, Mali; see Zimmerer et al. 2020). Greenhouse workers' acute precarity includes the history of anti-immigrant riots (Martín-Moreno et al. 2023) and continued chronic vulnerability to intense insecurities of highly marginalized food systems and other factors (Zimmerer et al. 2020).

## 3.2 | China

China's rapid development of the greenhouse-based intensification of agri-food systems now accounts for 60% of the global total (Tong et al. 2024). This greenhouse boom is built on plasticulture enclosures whose coverage has expanded exponentially since the 1990s, and currently exhibits strong clustering (Ou and Wang 2022). By 2019, the Weifang cluster in northeast China incorporated an estimated 82,155 ha of greenhouses (Tong et al. 2024). Smaller greenhouse clusters occur in certain notably poor rural regions such as Hebei and mountainous southeast China (Ou and Wang 2022). The Chinese examples highlight the extreme diversity of greenhouse types that range from low-cost, plastic-covered structures with earthen walls to technologically advanced designs. Spatial analyses suggest that the greenhouse boom in China is concentrated in the “periphery of large urban areas” (Tong et al. 2024, 7). Peri-urban areas in China have been the sites of highly uneven development that characteristically combines concentrated land rushes and the financialization of land with “green development” and “conservation zones” (Rodenbiker 2020).

Rapid growth of China's periurban and urban populations and food systems, along with transportation infrastructure and state policies that facilitate financialization, are principal drivers of its greenhouse boom (Ou and Wang 2022; Tong et al. 2024). Sociotechnical assemblages and socioeconomic conditions also animate China's greenhouse boom. Both plastic greenhouse coverings and plastic mulch as an inexpensive soil amendment illustrate the Plantationocene's industrialized “cheap nature.” The widespread use of plastic mulch increases water-use efficiency and further intensifies crop yield, although it also produces significant environmental pollution (E. K. Liu et al. 2014).

Demographic and socioeconomic drivers include the density of local populations and the levels of household income and sales (Ou and Wang 2022). Wealthier households tend to access financial, political, and policy-related resources that enable greenhouse construction and development in China. Moreover, households undertaking greenhouse agrifood intensification (e.g., greenhouse producers in periurban Beijing) rely on non-household wage labor that accounts for one-third to one half of production costs (Zhen et al. 2020, 6). Hired farmworkers that migrated from former rural areas experiencing agrarian crises

and decline are similarly important in the greenhouse complex around Gaizhou city (J. Liu et al. 2023). China-based research recommends that future greenhouse agri-food intensification be concentrated in large periurban spaces (J. Liu et al. 2023, 12) in tandem with regions utilizing immigrant farmworkers, although the racialization of this labor is not specified (e.g., Vietnamese farmworkers in southern China).

## 3.3 | Morocco

The greenhouse boom of Morocco is driven by national policies and international agreements for state-capital arrangements that have propelled agroexport markets, guided financialization, and assembled transportation networks. Historically, Morocco's Plan Maroc Vert (2008–2020) and subsequently the strategy known as Generation Green 2020–2030 have furnished the overarching support. Key international actors in financialization and state-capital integration have included agribusinesses from the European Union (e.g., greenhouse investors from Almería, Spain; Martín-Moreno et al. 2023), the United States (e.g., US AID), and global organizations. The greenhouse boom in Morocco is clustered in the twin Atlantic coast territories of the so-called Loukkos perimeter outside the city of Larache (Acharki and Veettil 2023) and the Souss-Massa—which overlaps the Chtouka Ait Basin—in the periurban spaces of Agadir (Veettil et al. 2023).

Sociotechnical assemblages animate the greenhouse boom in Morocco to produce blueberries, strawberries, and raspberries (predominately in the Loukkos perimeter, see Acharki and Veettil 2023, 23,013) and vegetables such as tomatoes, bell peppers, cucumbers, eggplant, squash, melons, and early-maturing watermelons (characteristic of the Souss-Massa greenhouse complex, see Acharki et al. 2024). Cold-chain deliveries to the European Union and UK are ensured through extensive transportation infrastructure including air transport, refrigeration trucks with dual Morocco-Spain transit authorization, and highway-ferry connections. Freshwater for irrigation and air supply from the nearby Atlantic are abundant in the Loukkos perimeter that is “well-known for its high ecological value” (Acharki and Veettil 2023, 23,013). In the Souss-Massa, subsidized projects for groundwater and surface irrigation are vital, such as the large-scale Agadir desalination plant. Another element of exploited “cheap nature” in the Souss-Massa are the coastal breezes and air flow from the adjacent Souss-Massa biosphere reserve that ventilate the greenhouse interiors. These high-quality environmental inputs to the greenhouse boom contrast the ecological footprint of their extensive water and air pollution.

Precarious labor distinguishes the greenhouse boom in Morocco (Medland 2021). A plentiful supply of inexpensive labor— primarily female—is provided from the nearby periurban and adjoining rural areas surrounding the greenhouses as well as rural migration from more distant national regions and internationally from West Africa (Medland 2021). Expelled by the deepening agrarian crises of these regions, the greenhouse workers receive low, insecure wages and can be subjected to toxic levels of pesticide exposure. Food insecurity among local
workers is widespread, with food access typically limited to inexpensive market-purchased and local foods that contrast Morocco's greenhouse agroexports to Europe (Akesbi 2014; Medland 2021).

## 3.4 | Mexico

Multiple fast-growing greenhouse clusters are located in the Chapala area of central Mexico, where coverage is estimated to have increased sevenfold between 2006 and 2019 (F. Wu et al. 2022). The greenhouses in Chapala, as well as elsewhere in Mexico (e.g., Sinaloa; Flores and Edwards 2019), specialize in the agroindustrial production of fresh vegetables and fruits (tomatoes, cucumbers, and peppers as well as strawberries and blueberries) for export to markets in the U.S. and Canada. This intensification has been fueled by financialization and state-capital arrangements of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and related neoliberal trade and agriculture policies.

The greenhouse boom in Mexico is propelled by the social-ecological dimensions of climate change and the soil-quality decline that weaken the productive capacity of the rural agri-cultural environments of smallholder food producers (González-Vera et al. 2020). Political-economic forces, such as the recent sharp rise of input prices, reflect the “double reproduction squeeze” occurring among smallholder farmers throughout Latin America (Zimmerer, Diez Hurtado, et al. 2024). It undermines their livelihoods and contributes to rural outmigration. These factors reduce the production of affordable foods, including the staple maize crop (González-Vera et al. 2020), and have further fueled the expansion of Mexico’s greenhouse boom. The plastic greenhouse enclosures in Chapala, for example, are commonly referred to in technical documents as serving the function of climate change-adapted “protected agriculture” (F. Wu et al. 2022), reflecting this broad rationale (see also related technologies such as shade houses; Flores and Edwards 2019). “Protected agriculture” is promoted as offering high-quality resources in contrast to the widespread polluted field sites of earlier spatial concentrations of agroexport horticulture (González 2014).

The sociotechnical assemblages noted above (e.g., inexpensive plastic coverings and irrigation infrastructure), as well as notably precarious work conditions, have animated the greenhouse boom in Mexico. Workers are drawn from landless groups and small-scale farmers who reside near the greenhouse clusters or who migrate seasonally from elsewhere in Mexico, reflecting the deepening of the country's rural agrarian crisis (González 2014). Additionally, farmworkers from other countries, such as Haiti and Venezuela, have also become more common in Mexico's agroexport production. Elements of this labor precarity include extremely low wages, extended work-days, gender and racial inequalities, unhealthy work and living conditions, and lack of job security, among other factors (González 2014). Pervasive “agri-food vulnerability” is common among these workers, whose resilience is based on their capacity to utilize, to the extent possible, the affordable items of diverse local food systems (González 2014, 296).

## 4 | Geographic Insights on the Global Greenhouse Boom and Suggestions for Future Research

This section suggests a series of principal insights and corresponding themes for future research on the global greenhouse boom by drawing on the above cases and the perspectives of environment-society geography and related fields as outlined in Section 2. Discussion is centered on the global greenhouse boom as the accelerating expansion of volumetric agri-food enclosures in spatial-territorial clusters of sociotechnical assemblages formed through land and water rushes and financialization. Other prominent environment-society dimensions include workers' precarious food strategies and health. Additionally, we suggest the global greenhouse trajectories pose both continuity and disruption of key precepts of geographic studies of agri-food intensification. Our discussion is anchored in the wide-ranging variation of the global greenhouse boom, as illustrated by the above cases, which influences the multiplicity of major trends.

A new wave of volumetric enclosures is encompassed in the global greenhouse boom that suggests the development of a distinct new phase of agri-food intensification and the Plantationocene. Indeed, a defining commonality, notwithstanding the wide array of greenhouse types (Moulton 2017), is the three-dimensional enclosure of production space. The accelerating volumetric enclosures of the global greenhouse boom are dependent on sociotechnical assemblages incorporating the proliferating use of plastic films that have been made inexpensive by the global petro-colonial energy industry. The concept of volumetric enclosure enlarges the meanings of resource appropriation and privatization in Plantationocene scholarship of geography and critical agrarian studies. Additionally, this volumetric expansion of agri-food production in the Plantationocene is entangled with other volumetric enclosures in the built spaces that characterize peri-urbanization and extended urbanization in countries such as China (Rodenbiker 2020).

Enclosures of land and water systems have been historically foundational in the Plantationocene through the dispospositions and struggles of previously land-accessing smallholder farmers and peasants as well as other marginalized social groups who have been converted to wage-work dependency amid the transformations of modern capitalism and modernity itself (Borras and Franco 2023; Chao et al. 2024; Davis et al. 2019; Wolford 2021). The global greenhouse boom is revealing both a novel volumetric dimension of Plantationocene resource enclosure as well as an expanding global enclosure movement. Their three-dimensional spaces enclose resources essential to life, notably air and water, as well as the soil-resembling plant substrates that are discussed below. The global greenhouse boom thus combines with other fast-growing agrifood intensification technologies (e.g., aquaculture, hydroponics, confined animal systems) that are producing voluminous new three-dimensional spaces of global enclosures. Further geographic research is needed on this new enclosure movement and its multiple dimensions.

A second insight and theme for further research is embedded in the power of the highly dynamic sociotechnical assemblages of the global greenhouse boom that combine the extensive use of both inexpensive industrial inputs (“cheap industry”) and
similarly accessed resource inputs (“cheap nature”; Barua 2023). Here we draw special attention to the sociotechnical and material transformations of assembled soils or planting media that combine industrial or extracted components that are crucial to greenhouse enclosures. For example, plastic mulches for soils are used extensively as a chief constituent of so-called plasticulture (e.g., China), extracted beach sand can be mixed with topsoil that has been extracted elsewhere (e.g., the sand-box technique in Spain), and extracted soil can be combined with cheap imported materials such as coconut husks (e.g., Peru; Bell et al. 2023).

The “de-soilization of the Earth,” which has been described metaphorically by Latour and co-authors in writing about the Plantationocene (Latour et al. 2018, 592), is evidenced in this study by concrete examples and specific elaborations that furnish insight and a suggested theme ripe for future research. Particularly, we emphasize the burgeoning opportunity for future research in geography and related fields to uncover the material, conceptual, and historical dimensions of resource transformations that partially resemble yet give more specific meaning and nuanced interpretations to the notion of the Plantationocene’s planetary “de-soilization.” For example, the replacement of natural processes, as represented in “de-soilization,” suggests a new sociotechnical entanglement of “cheap industry” with “cheap nature” in the global greenhouse boom.

Equally important, the global greenhouse boom has hinged on certain sociotechnical assemblages and infrastructure technologies such as the inexpensive plastic-film technologies used for greenhouse enclosures and, in some cases, the high-tech water purification and irrigation delivery systems. Such crucial inputs to the global greenhouse boom are often subsidized by nature and governments. Moreover, distinct sociotechnical assemblages underwrite the global greenhouse boom, even while incorporating elements resembling current field-based agricultural systems (Guthman 2019; Montenegro de Wit and Canfield 2024; Werner et al. 2022).

Our third geographic insight and suggested theme for future research encompasses the tightknit relations of land and water systems in the territoriality of the global greenhouse boom, especially its embeddedness in the wide-ranging periurban expansion of so-called extended urbanization. Territorially and spatially, the global greenhouse boom has resulted in characteristic clusters that are often referred to as greenhouse zones and belts, or with colloquial terms (e.g., “sea of plastic” or *mar de plástico* in Spain) (Zimmerer et al. 2022). Concentrated greenhouse clusters are thus closely related to the rapid global increase of extended urbanization that is propelling and being propelled by new land and water rushes (Keil 2018).

Various rapidly evolving relationships reflect the crucial dynamics of periurban spaces per se in the global greenhouse boom. Spain and Morocco are powerful examples of these dynamic periurban relations, while China and Mexico provide significant albeit partial illustrations. The availability of inexpensive greenhouse labor in periurban spaces is reflected in both the locations of greenhouse-based agrifood intensification and workers’ residences (Zimmerer et al. 2020). Similarly, the embeddedness of the greenhouse boom in urbanization-linked

supply chains and transportation networks has supported this global boom and its geographic dynamics to-date.

Periurban territorialization of the global greenhouse boom, including the massive transformation of land and water systems, are suggested here as a particular geographic insight and theme for future research. Periurban territory-making, including the Plantationocene phenomena of “land rushes” and “water rushes,” help to drive the demise and transformation of agrarian systems at the same time as they are opening new modes of the global greenhouse boom and other new agri-food intensification. As such, these territorialized entanglements highlight the pivotal role of periurban spaces as central to the distinctive contours of the contemporary agrarian question in which extended urbanization is a crucial factor in the ongoing development of agrarian capitalism and the fates of smallholder and peasant farmers (Balakrishnan and Gururani 2021; Ghosh and Meer 2021).

Fourth, the marginalized agri-food systems of greenhouse workers are an integral element of the global greenhouse boom warranting future research. The food systems and labor of local and immigrant farmworkers are unjustly precarious and rapidly evolving amid intensive, industrial agri-food systems (Minkoff-Zern 2014; Sexsmith 2022; Zimmerer et al. 2020). This research focus can help strengthen workers’ agency in broad-based efforts to benefit the social justice and ecological-nutritional conditions of food systems at the margins of the monocultures of the Plantationocene. Such efforts can be allied to the potential for alternatives being promoted by farmer, food, and seed-centered social movements (Wolford 2021; Zimmerer, Aumeeruddy-Thomas, et al. 2024; Zimmerer 2025), as well as agroecological and Indigenous knowledge-led approaches (Wezel et al. 2015). More broadly, the focus on marginalized food systems of workers and other racialized subaltern groups enables us to see the global greenhouse boom as rooted in the relationality of Plantationocene agri-food systems (Carney 2021; Qazi and Selfa 2005; Zimmerer et al. 2023).

Finally, our study of the global greenhouse boom advocates for geographic insight and future research on agricultural intensification that is coordinated with land-system and sustainability sciences and related fields (e.g., Kuemmerle et al. 2013; Meyfroidt et al. 2018; Zuo et al. 2018). These approaches have become central to such high-profile goals as global sustainable intensification and agri-food intensification for global biodiversity conservation. Recently, leading land-system, sustainability, and agroecological researchers have raised alarm about the “reality of increasing [agricultural] specialization and intensification…including large monocultures, *greenhouse farming*…” (Tscharntke et al. 2022, 397, italics added). Here, geographic models have tended to assume that favorable production factors in modern agrarian centers will guide ongoing spatial concentration. By contrast, the unfolding Plantationocene dynamics and spatialities of the global greenhouse boom disrupt these geographic precepts.

Specifically, the greenhouse boom is resulting in a novel global geography of agri-food intensification that features periurban locations, as described above, and highly integrated yet widely varied rural areas. In short, unlike the assumed geographic
trajectory that is centered on existing agricultural intensification, the contours of greenhouse agri-food intensification can be seen as often spatially distinct, temporally abrupt, and conceptually disruptive. As a result, agri-food intensification is being re-centered by the Plantationocene dynamics of the global greenhouse boom and related trends. By disrupting, engaging, and potentially reshaping geographic understandings and expanding debates on agri-food intensification, this focus of our study suggests a key insight and promising theme for future research.

Finally, we note general limitations and additional themes for future research on the global greenhouse boom that extend beyond the scope of this study. Notable methodological limitations and difficulties have been identified in greenhouse research to-date (e.g., on Morocco see Medland 2021). Several promising research themes are contained in the case studies (Section 3) though they are not yet amplified through the aforementioned environment-society perspectives. Examples include the greenhouse-boom themes of historical development, financialization, state-capital flows, rural depopulation, national and international migration flows, and in-depth ecological analysis. Additional themes of the global greenhouse boom are beyond the bounds of our study (e.g., agri-food datafication and informatics, geographies of international trade and labor, long-term histories of imperialism and intersectional analyses of racism, class and gender, flows of energy and materials, more-than-human dimensions). For example, in-depth case studies of both the countries surveyed above and others, such as the Netherlands, Vietnam, Norway, Peru, France, United States of America, and Canada, promise to focus on rapidly increasing automation, robotics, and informatics in the global greenhouse boom (e.g., on datafication see Montenegro de Wit and Canfield 2024; on Global North agri-informatics exports to the Global South see Fairbairn and Kish 2022). We also suggest that the more-than-human dimension (e.g., Lawrence 2022; Maye et al. 2022) of the global greenhouse boom offers potentially important new understanding with promising research that reaches beyond the scope of the present study.

## 5 | Conclusions

Powerful geographic dynamics fuel the accelerating scope and magnitude of the global greenhouse boom as a rapidly expanding form of agri-food intensification. Five perspectives of environment-society geography derived from critical agrarian studies and the Plantationocene have been engaged to develop conceptual themes toward a suggested framework for understanding this boom: a wave of volumetric enclosures driven by financialization and state-capital arrangements, political ecologies of industrial agriculture and greenhouse agri-food systems, sociotechnical assemblages, labor conditions and precarity including greenhouse workers' food strategies, and the land and water systems related to agri-food intensification. Using these framing concepts, we constructed a series of concise case studies of Spain, China, Morocco, and Mexico that are among the leading countries in the global greenhouse boom and representative of trends in Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

The case studies reveal the applicability and promise of geographic concepts for understanding the development of greenhouse enclosures in distinctive clusters that are highly integrated into long-distance transport and market networks. Additionally, they illustrate the crucial importance to this development of sociotechnical and material assemblages and the labor and food system precarity of greenhouse workers. Overview of environment-society perspectives and the subsequent country-level case studies (Section 2 and Section 3, respectively) demonstrate key commonalities and specify variation in the global greenhouse boom. The series of suggested conceptual insights and research themes opens a focused dialog in geography and related fields (Section 4). It begins with greenhouse enclosures signalling a new dimension of the ongoing Plantationocene enclosure movement that resembles other volumetric forms of expanding global agri-food intensification. These volumetric enclosures encompass new resource capture targeting high-quality water and air, extensive property-making, and intensified wage-labor mobilization.

The sociotechnical and material assemblages animating the global greenhouse boom combine cheap industrial products, especially plastic film technology, and the so-called cheap nature of resources to provide a tangible example of recent Plantationocene “de-soilization.” Various additional Plantationocence dynamics of the global greenhouse boom, including long-distance transport and marketing as well as racialized and gendered labor precarity, are closely entangled with the extended urbanization of periurban spaces expanding worldwide. Finally, by engaging understanding and debates on the geographic trajectories of agri-food intensification, the global greenhouse boom sheds new light on grand themes of global sustainability policies and debate, including sustainable intensification and intensification for global biodiversity conservation.

## Acknowledgments

We gratefully acknowledge the opportunity to have developed this research in the context of presentations at the conference sessions on “Spatial reconfigurations of food production and nature protection: Geographies of intensification, infrastructure, and biodiversity use and conservation” that we organized at the 2024 AAG meeting in Honolulu. We especially appreciate the comments from and discussion with the other participants in the sessions. We also thank our collaborators in field research projects on the global greenhouse boom, Odolin Rodriguez Tinoco in Peru and Yolanda Jiménez Olivencia and Laura Rodríguez Porcel in Spain, as well as ongoing discussions with our colleagues Trevor Birkenholtz, Brian Dowd-Uribe, Kathy Sexsmith, Sarah Halvorson, Russ Hedberg, Alex Wenger, and Stephen Zimmerer. For the support of field research, KSZ acknowledges the Spain Fulbright Commission (2017–2019) and the MAK’IT Visiting Scientist fellowship at the University of Montpellier, France (2022–2023).

## Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

## Data Availability Statement

The authors have nothing to report.
## Endnotes

¹This perspective traces to a lineage of environment-society ideas associated with the notion of a “subsidy from nature” used to frame potentially sustainable, rainforest-based livelihoods in the 1980s and 1990s. More recently, the perspective of “cheap nature” has been used to help understand the expansion of agroindustrial plantations (Barua 2023).

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