As an average “climate-anxious” and socially-conscious Afro-European Millennial, I have grown accustomed to navigating through life, grievously aware of the weight of my consumption.
Four years ago, I started mainly buying secondhand clothing. I timidly – but conceitedly – pride myself on never having purchased a single item from Shein or Temu. My unwavering love for food does not prevent me from seeing it as a political battleground, one that is not detached from ethics. While grocery shopping, I clutch my phone, scanning the aisles, checking labels and barcodes, and verifying lists and names of brands to boycott. The impending doom and sense of helplessness that overcomes me while watching martyred bodies in Gaza, in Sudan, in Lebanon, in Eastern Congo, slowly subsides when I know I was somehow less complicit in these massacres. My hands feel less tainted with blood. Back in my hometown in Italy, shopping at the farmers’ market often soothes my restlessness. Buying “farm-to-table”, seasonal food, supporting small farmers’ businesses, and all that. The bountiful fruit and vegetable stalls in the town square, along with the hard-working and smiley elderly farmers, all appear less problematic, less tarnished by tragedy and death.
Satnam Singh was just about 31 years old when, on 17 June of last year, he crushed his arm in a plastic wrapping machine at work. He had been working at Antonello Lovato’s small business in Latina for about two years, together with his wife, Soni. Most news headlines have vaguely described Satnam as a Punjabi undocumented worker, whose entire life appears contained in the crude, brutal tragedy of his death. A whole existence condensed into the minute description of how the machinery ripped off his right arm and lower limbs, all along with the banality of evil of his employer who, after forbidding everyone on the plantation from calling an ambulance, abandoned Satnam’s body near his home and placed the severed arm in a vegetable harvesting box.
About two months after Satnam’s death, still in Latina, 54-year-old Dalvir Singh dies of exhaustion in the scorching August heat. Dalvir was Punjabi like Satnam, and he worked on a flower farm to support his family back home. He would often tell his colleagues that he was planning to return to northern India for good in the coming years. Famakan Dembele, 28, also died of extreme heat and exhaustion, just one year before Dalvir. He was originally from Mali and had just arrived in Foggia a few weeks prior. He worked as a tomato picker in the ghetto of Torretta Antonacci, infamously known for its deplorable conditions and the recurrent cases of violence against migrants. He was found lifeless after his shift, lying in the shade of an olive tree, under the rain.
Famakan’s, Satnam’s, and Dalvir’s deaths are not isolated incidents but rather part of a systematic and ever-growing mosaic of workers exploited and murdered by the phenomenon of ‘Caporalato’.
What is ‘Caporalato’ – and how does it kill?
‘Caporalato’ is an illegal form of labour recruitment and exploitation; it derives its name from ‘caporali’, a slang term for middlemen who coordinate short-term labour with complete disregard for hiring rules and workers’ rights, often to the benefit of organised criminal syndicates and mafia-like businesses. The manual workers in these settings are commonly referred to as ‘braccianti’, meaning ‘people who work manually, with their arms’ (in Italian, ‘braccia’).
This phenomenon is widely spread in the agricultural sector, but not exclusively. Italy is among “the top three countries in the EU for agricultural production and for the number of workers in the sector, employing more than 1.1 million people”. Of this figure, more than a third is irregular or uncontracted labour. A 2023 report by FLAI-CGIL (Federation of Agro-Industry Workers) estimates that approximately 200,000 workers are exploited in the Italian agri-food industry alone, with 55,000 of them being women. According to the report, Italian agri-food turnover is worth 73.5 billion euros per year, yet workers’ payrolls average just over 6,000 euros a year.
If the local, small-scale farmers’ market suggests a closer, almost “intimate” relationship and proximity between buyer and seller, the extent of the exploitation of those who work the land seems virtually rarefied, invisibilized. As my body feels less tense when I buy organic fruit and vegetables at the market, ‘caporalato’ systems control one-fourth of Italy’s agricultural workforce, benefiting not only the Italian food economy but also that of the European and Global North as a whole.
The phenomenon of ‘caporalato’ and exploitation in agriculture in Italy is, however, anything but new. In the 20th century, these schemes exploited poor Italian workers who moved locally or to other regions, particularly in the fruit and vegetable sector in the South and in the construction sector in the North. Despite Italy’s continued resistance to considering itself a country of immigration, its agricultural industry today employs a significant number of foreign workers, who now account for 37% of all workers—a figure that is not entirely accurate, given the difficulty of censusing irregular and uncontracted labor. A large proportion of these workers are Africans and South Asians who arrived by ‘illegalised’ border crossing. As of 2018, at least 59% of foreign farmworkers are African, with the majority hailing from, in descending order, Morocco, Senegal, Tunisia, Nigeria, Mali, and the Gambia. A large proportion of migrant day labourers lead nomadic lives, moving from north to south seasonally. More than one-third of uncontracted workers are in Campania, Calabria, Sicilia, Puglia, and Lazio; however, criminal exploitation is widespread throughout the Italian peninsula, especially in Emilia-Romagna, Toscana, Piemonte, and Veneto.
Although the phenomenon of ‘caporalato’ reflects an overarching weakness in the systems of labour rights protection in Italy, which also affects “white” and “regular” Italian citizens, the migrant ‘bracciante’ occupies an even more vulnerable, targetable, expendable, and invisibilized status. In her book Emergency in Transit: Witnessing Migration in the Colonial Present, researcher Eleanor Paynter perfectly stated that the “perceived expendability of Black subjects” is part of “the continuum of racialized suffering and death shaping the borders of Europe and reifying the otherness against which Europe defines itself”. And, as the tragedies mentioned above show, it is this perceived expendability which renders these migrants the ideal victims for ‘caporalato’ to kill effectively and silently, under the eyes of no one and everyone.
People die of neglect, like Satnam; they die of overworking, like Famakan and Dalvir. The “banality of evil” and inhumanity shown to Satnam’s battered body is just one of many documented cases, like that of Fatty and Yaya, from Guinea and Senegal, who died crushed by a car that did not stop to assist them in February 2019. They were both less than 20 years old. Many die while resting or sleeping in the shabby and cramped tent-cities that often catch fire. Some are targeted and assassinated for protesting these conditions and abuses, like Soumaila Sacko, Malian human rights defender and active member of the grassroots union USB (Unione Sindacale di Base), who was assassinated on 2 June 2018 while he was collecting scrap metal from an abandoned factory to build a shack in the settlement of San Ferdinando where he used to live.
Some also die by suicide, at the hands of a precarious context where they see no other choice but to end their despair. That is how Ghanaian Thomas Yeboah, 33, passed on in January 2020. He was working and living in one of the many ghettos in the province of Foggia, in Puglia, and sought to explore better opportunities in France and Spain. He got stuck at the border in Ventimiglia because of the Security Decree of the time that denied him a residence permit to expatriate. He returned home and hung himself from a tree.
How much blood do our tomatoes hold? And how much will keep spilling out?
All of these (in)visible deaths cascade into one another, with no end in sight. They shock and outrage us with the abuse, the senselessness of their deaths, only to fade into oblivion. They are all bodies whose mortality we have grown used to. Who is responsible for the deaths of undocumented foreign workers like Satnam or Famakan? Who is responsible for Thomas’ suicide, whose glimpse of a life with slightly better conditions was swept away by the highly restrictive immigration policies? There are no single, isolated culprits other than intricate, interconnected racial capitalist mechanisms that have continuously fed on the oppressed to stay afloat.
However, in more ways than one, the food we eat and that is harvested and produced by these “braccianti” is inextricably related to issues of migrants’ mobility rights; the juicy Mediterranean tomatoes that adorn our plates, the lifeless bodies lying under the scorching sun after the harvest, the cramped reception centres and the deaths at sea, are all linked and enabled by our emergency-driven and restrictive migration management systems and policies. As stated by researcher Eleanor Paynter in her book, migrant labour serves as a “permanent temporary” supply to support agricultural industries in high- and low-income countries throughout and beyond the Mediterranean region. It is not only people without “legal” residence permits who perform irregular work; the pool of individuals includes undocumented migrants, as well as asylum seekers, refugees, and migrants with various forms of humanitarian or short-term visas. However, this demographic generally holds a very precarious and highly politicised mobility status.
Regardless of the political faction, the general Italian migration management framework has not been able to move beyond an emergency-driven approach since the start of the “refugee crisis” in the 2010s. No matter the reforms or the multiple government changes, we find ourselves in front of political voices that handle migration as a never-ending crisis, and migrants as deportable and exploitable subjects. Already in 2002, with the Bossi-Fini law, Italy began a process of progressive erosion of the right to mobility, all under the guise of eliminating “irregular migration”. A trend that marches hand in hand with the European overarching framework.
Western globalised economies use appeals to “illegal” and uncontrolled immigration, the alleged “undeserving” of economic migrants, and the subalternity of refugees to “maintaining a labour force about whom publics not only don’t have to care but, crisis framings suggest, should be wary”. Thus one wonders why “illegalised” arrivals by sea and land and applying for political asylum appear to be the most viable routes, if not the only; why Europe can, on the one hand, appeal against “illegalised” immigration while making more money in visas denied than issued (in 2024 alone, Africans lost $70 million in denied, non-refundable Visa fees to Europe). A system unable to reflect on the structural constraints of its policies and that does not recognise all people’s “freedom of mobility”, will always “illegalise”, criminalise – and therefore not protect – people whose only fault is having tried to make a life for themselves. And will always depict them as deportable, expendable, exploitable, and invisible.
References
ECRE (European Council on Refugees and Exiles). “Salvini decree approved by Italian Senate, amid citizen’s protests and institutional criticism”. (2018, November 16). https://ecre.org/salvini-decree-approved-by-italian-senate-amid-citizens-protests-and-institutional-criticism/
Ghirardi, M. “In crescita i lavoratori agricoli africani in Italia”. (2023, April 26). Rivista Africa. https://www.africarivista.it/in-crescita-i-lavoratori-agricoli-africani-in-italia/216137/?srsltid=AfmBOorhXhlFMGSCnw8aZlnWI5pdZf3IMHzmR1MZczXF-02SBCvk8Nx1
InfoMigrants via Ansa. “Armed guards at Foggia migrant settlement after attack”. (2021, April 30). InfoMigrants. https://www.infomigrants.net/fr/post/31889/armed-guards-at-foggia-migrant-settlement-after-attack
Laudini, A. “Succede in Italia: un bracciante punjabi, vittima dello sfruttamento, viene lasciato morire”. (2024, August 22). Progressive International. https://progressive.international/wire/2024-08-22-in-italy-an-exploited-punjabi-farmworker-is-left-to-die/it
Madowo, L. “Africans lost nearly $70M to denied visas applications to Europe in 2024”. (2025, May 21). CNN. https://edition.cnn.com/2025/05/21/travel/africans-europe-schengen-denied-visas-applications
Mori, T. “Quei braccianti sfruttati e uccisi nel silenzio”. (2020, July 30). Lavialibera. https://lavialibera.it/it-schede-205-braccianti_caporalato_coronavirus_morti_suicidi_decreti_salvini
Musabimana, G., “Who deserves to emigrate? Mapping the loopholes at the Africa-Italy Summit of 2024” (2024, April 12). Diaspora Africa. https://diasporaafrica.org/who-deserve-to-emigrate-mapping-the-loopholes-at-the-africa-italy-summit-of-2024/
Paynter, E. (2024). Oranges and Riot Gear. In Emergency in Transit: Witnessing Migration in the Colonial Present (1st ed., pp. 167–190). University of California Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/jj.27079994.12 Passotti, L. “Caporalato: triplicati i casi in agricoltura”. (2024, December 4). Osservatorio Diritti. https://www.osservatoriodiritti.it/2024/12/04/caporalato-agricoltura/
Writer: Giselle Musabimana
Editor: Beatrice Nwoko
Image: "Il Caporalato" as exhibited at MAAM Museo dell’Altro e dell’Altrove di Metropoliz_città provided with permission for limited use by the author, Stefano maria Girardi.
Editorial Oversight: Chimee Adịọha, Amaka Obioji