Here is California! Immigrant labor force in the intensive agriculture of Capitanata

Abstract

The paper aims at providing the structural determinants that explain poor living conditions, exploitative working position, precarious life possibilities, careless public treatment and racist social environment of immigrant working force in the vegetable and fruits agricultural sector of the Capitanata region in Puglia. In the first part of the paper, the methodology adopted is to investigate intensive agriculture in Capitanata as an application of the Californian production model described by French scholar Jean-Pierre Berlan. The comparison with the Californian model is allowed, besides from pedoclimatic similarities, by the common structural role played by migration. Thus, Berlan’s archetype works as a tool for describing the agricultural system in which immigrants’ working force is inscribed. The comparison is divided into four chapters, corresponding to the features of the Californian model: (1) the inheritance of a latifundary land structure and its consequences on nowadays’ regime of landownership; (2) the criteria that define intensive agriculture and the forces that make its implantation possible; (3) the type, amount and working conditions of the immigrant labor force employed; and, lastly, (4) the auto-regenerative strength of the system. Then, the study of immigrant laborers’ exploitation in the perspective of the Californian model is located within the dynamics of the big-scale agri-business reorganization in an ultra-neoliberal perspective. Hence, in the second part of the paper, the analysis of public policies’ consequences is organized according to three guidelines: (5) the radicalization of landownership’s concentration and fragmentation processes; (6) the removal of protections from the domestic market and the intensification of first sector’s dependence on public funding; (7) the enlargement of the power of the agro-industrial lobby and the choking of vegetable and fruits producers. Lastly, the Californian model is used as a tool of study in order to read and interpret the actions of protest against this system of exploitation carried out by different actors. This allows to highlight the successes and limits of what has been done so far, to criticize some new simplistic proposals and to identify what currently appears to be the real crux of the system that needs to be addressed. That is, to break the bottleneck power of large retail chains to reclaim our right to food sovereignty.