Lessons from the mountains

Abstract

International migrant workers and extensive agricultural systems This chapter explores the role of international migrant workers in mountainous, island, and inner territories that cover large parts of Mediterranean Europe (Greece, Spain, and Italy), where intensive and mechanised agriculture is not feasible due to agro-ecological features and the nature of the terrain (steep, remote, rocky). The modernisation process that unfolded in the aftermath of the Second World War has further pushed agriculture towards more market-oriented and capital-based patterns. As a result, these settings have been marginalised and undergone longstanding decline, leading to economic crisis, demographic regression, and land abandonment (Jentsch and Simard 2009, Nori and Farinella 2020). Here agro-pastoral systems-the extensive livestock rearing of mostly sheep and goats (but also cattle, horses, and pigs) based on natural or cultivated grazing and complemented by forms of crop farming-still represent a main source of local livelihood. As shepherding has become a less attractive opportunity for local populations, labour is today increasingly provided by international migrants. This chapter presents the results of extensive fieldwork based on ethnographic observations, field notes, and semi-structured interviews with some 170 stockbreeders and 50 international migrant shepherds over the last five years in different regions of Mediterranean Europe: Greece (Peloponnese and Thessaly), Spain (Cataluña), and Italy (Piedmont, Trivento, Abruzzo, and Sardinia). Qualitative research was conducted by the authors, with semistructured interviews collected both directly and through collaborators. Agropastoral settings provide an original perspective because most European literature (among others, Ortiz-Miranda et al. 2013, Gertel and Sippel 2014, Corrado et al. 2016) focuses on migrants' presence in intensive agricultural systems that characterise high-potential areas, while limited research explores other production systems (Rye and Scott 2018).

Fruit production and exploited labor in northern Italy: Redefining urban responsibility toward the agrarian ground

“…In the following sections, albeit being anonymized, interview excerpts are specified according to the role each interviewee played within the PAS structure and its interconnection with other relevant local initiatives. The collected information has been analyzed in connection with the rich anthropological and sociological scholarship on both brokerage and labor exploitation within migration networks (Bierschenk et al, 2002;Boissevain, 1974;Farinella & Nori, 2020;Murphy, 1981;Perrotta, 2014;Wolf, 1956) and morphogenesis of informal settlements and territorial planning (Brovia & Piro, 2021;Dovey et al, 2020).…”

“…Migrant agricultural workers use formal sources rarely, relying instead on informal sources to avoid legal problems. As pointed out by Farinella and Nori (2020), recruitment is often by word of mouth through the reactivation of personal networks and definition of individual arrangements among migrant communities who often engage and contact friends and relatives. However, relying on informal networks for job placement and hosting can expose workers to exploitative conditions.…”

Uncertainty, pastoral knowledge and early warning: a review of drought management in the drylands, with insights from northern Kenya

“…Whilst early warning systems are established on calculative control and the reduction of uncertainty to risk and thus "lack flexibility and the ability to experiment, improvise and fail" (Caravani et al, 2021: 6), it is well understood that pastoralists tend to understand and manage uncertainty in a drastically different manner. A rich and extremely well-evidenced body of literature spanning multiple contexts in Africa's drylands shows how pastoral livelihoods and economies tend to be oriented toward embracing and working with uncertainty, not buffering against it (for example, Scoones, 2023;Farinella and Nori, 2020;Lind et al, 2020). Pastoralists make the most of the characteristic variability of the lands they occupy and indeed are actively productive by means of it (Krätli, 2015).…”

Two Close-to-Nature Lifestyles, One Benefit for the Cultural Landscape: Comparing Lifestyle Movers and Lifestyle Farmers in the Remote European Eastern Alps

“…Albeit rarely, due to land access restrictions, immigrants also adopt farming activities and employment (Pereira and Oiarzabal 2018; Farinella and Nori 2020) or take over entire farms (Grubbström and Joosse 2021). Using “new farming” approaches (Gretter et al 2019), these “new pioneers” (Beismann et al 2022) innovatively recombine local past knowledge and practices with exogenous resources to foster wellbeing and advance socioeconomic relationships among locals, newcomers, and visitors to marginalized mountain communities.…”