Alcamo and Campobello di Mazara: The Exploitation Continues In the Sicilian Countryside

A few weeks after our last visit to Campobello, we returned to see our contacts living in the informal camp at Erbe Bianche. The tent city has grown hugely: more than 400 people now live there, awaiting the imminent commencement of the olive harvest.

Campobello di Mazara (Trapani): The informal camp at Erbe Bianche

Campobello di Mazara: Precarious Agricultural Labour and Discrimination

Campobello di Mazara is one of the most important stops in the cycle of seasonal labour in Sicily. Between September and December each year around 1,300 farm workers come to the area in order to work in the olive harvest, the majority of them originally from Subsaharian Africa. The situation is complicated. Although workers have been camping out in one of the nearby fields – “Erbe Bianche”, ‘White Grass’ – for many years, since 2014 a further space has been added, surrounding the former olive processing plant, confiscated from the Mafia.

The camp at Erbe Blanche, Campobello di Mazara (Province of Trapani)

My dream is the present - Interview with Yvan Sagnet

by Daniela Sammito, from Il Clandestino - Yvan Sagnet comes from Cameroon. In 2007 he came to Italy to study, enrolling at the Turin Politecnico. In the summer of 2011, in order to fund his studies he went to work in Nardò (Puglia), where seasonal workers are hired for the tomato harvest. He found work at the Masseria di Boncuri and soon began to understand the inhumane living standards and working conditions which the caporali (black market bosses who take charge of the illegal hiring of manual workers, often immigrants) subject their labourers to. Sagnet took part in the very first independent strike to be organised by foreign farm labourers in Italy. We met him in Vittoria during a debate on "Territory and Rights", which had been organised by the trade union groups, CGIL, FLAI and the Social Cooperative, Proxima. 

10 hours of work in the fields, 15 euro

by argocatania.org
Working 10 hours in the countryside for 15 euros is a crime and not only in Paternò (see the M. Barresi inquiry on the first three pages of La Sicilia 24/4/2012) but in the majority of this area, this region and indeed the South of Italy and it is reserved for the foreign workforce (see CGIL-FLAI-Sicilia). The hiring of the workers is carried out in exactly the same way as it has been for the last 10 years: at 5am in a pre-arranged square, the "bosses" choose Sicilians and foreigners which are then made to get into vans and lorries which transport them to the countryside. The workers each have to give the "boss" €5.

Vittoria, foreign workers humiliated an offended

Antonello Mangano
"We work at night as if it were midday." These are the words of one of the Tunisians in Vittoria, who has invested his own savings in order to become a small landowner. He is one of those who escaped only to arrive in a thirty year system of exploitation which guaranteed green gold (a recently coined term used to describe the wealth generated from the agricultural sector) for the Italians, yet only hunger for the foreigners. Today, an article in the Repubblica, written without a shred of evidence, accuses the migrants of being prestanome (buying land in their name on behalf of the mafia using mafia funds).