Ethno-racialisation at the intersection of food and migration regimes: Reading processes of farm-labour substitution against the grain of migration policies in Italy (1980-present)

Abstract

The paper puts the food regime model, as elaborated by scholars such as Harriet Friedmann and Philip McMichael, into articulation with the analysis of migration/border regimes, as proposed by critical migration scholars. If by now it is well established that the policies that regulate the mobility of migrant labour play a crucial role in enabling capitalist accumulation in contemporary global agriculture, few analyses have delved into the actual mechanisms which make this possible, and into their histories. The argument is developed by reference to the Italian case, showing how subsequent waves of substitution of Italian labourers with migrants, that began in the 1980s, have followed different patterns. It argues that these can be understood by reading them against the grain of the changes accruing in the transnational migration regime. Thus, precarisation and segmentation of the labour force in the farming sector are shown to have been actively fostered by policies which have made of undocumented or differentially included labour one of the pillars upon which globally integrated food production has relied for the past three decades. Whilst based on national-scale statistics and secondary literature, the analysis also builds upon a sustained presence and engaged participant research in some of the Italian agroindustrial enclaves that record the highest presence of migrant labour.

The management of Covid19 pandemic and its impact on migrant farmworkers in Italy: anthropological insights

“…The restrictive migration policy of the EU border regime, in particular, has turned asylum into one of the few, if not the only, legal entry channels to Europe for the large majority of citizens from the global South (Karakayali and Rigo, 2010; Peano, 2020a). As a result, the Italian agro-industrial sector, which has traditionally relied on foreign workers, is increasingly turning to workers who have been granted legal status (if any) for humanitarian reasons rather than work reasons (Dines and Rigo, 2015; Peano, 2021).…”

“…Over the years, the dramatic housing and working conditions of ghetto dwellers have been the object of media coverage, which has conveyed a reductionist representation of agricultural laborers as mainly black, victims of gangmastering and trafficking. This way, the media have tended to avoid any reference to the role of markets and retailers in perpetuating a model of work based on exploitation (Corrado et al, 2018;De Castro et al, 2016;Peano, 2020a;Perrotta, 2016). When the health emergency started, at the beginning of 2020, in a synecdochic way ghetto dwellers came to represent almost the whole category of "migrant workers" in political and media representations.…”

The ‘Long Spring’ of migration management: Labour supply in the pandemic-induced EU border regime

“…Informal settlements of braccianti are often in close proximity of asylum reception centres. These informal settlements, as well as reception centres themselves, have turned into centres for the recruitment of an underpaid and often informal workforce ( Peano, 2020a ) through an exploitative system of recruitment known as ‘caporalato’ (gang mastering).…”

Migrant farmworkers: Resisting and organising before, during and after COVID‐19

“…Workers from poorer and racialised countries are mobilised by neoliberal agricultural policies, which have dispossessed their livelihoods in their home countries, to work in a foreign country, where their labour and physical mobility are controlled and restricted by their status of being deportable (Rogaly, 2021; Smith, 2015; Zuntz et al, 2022). Their immobility is further ensured by unscrupulous recruiters, whose hold on workers is ironically increased by restrictive, securitised border controls (Thiemann, 2016), rural isolation of farms, control by farm employers and xenophobic and racialised segregation from national and local communities (López‐Sala, 2022; Melossi, 2021; Peano, 2021; Venkatesh, 2019). All the case studies in the symposium show how the dire working and living conditions function under a systemic framework of unfree labour that replicates historical colonialism and systemic racism by ensuring precarity of labour and immigration status, surveillance and policing, and systemic discrimination against historically othered populations.…”