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)

Invisible People, Ripe for Exploiting.

After two months, we went back to Campobello di Mazara, to check on the conditions on the campsite at the former olive oil factory, and the migrants left there looking for work. We were contacted by two young African men who told us that they had been once again utterly abandoned by a blind politics, by a citizenry dead to cries for help, and by the passion for exploitation demonstrated by those with mandarin trees bearing fruit.

Ph: The former oil factory confiscated from the Mafia, at Campbell di Mazara

The tent city of Campobello di Mazzara

In the heart of Campobello di Mazzara, where olives have been cultivated for more than thirty years, no one has managed to find an alternative to the shameful and uncivilised practices adopted for the harvest. Yet again we are bound to write about the exploitation of migrants in the countryside.

As usual, we returned to the tent city to understand in greater depth the dynamics which lie behind the exploitation of those exploited in Campobello.

Contrada Pian del Lago in Caltanissetta: camps in 2015

Measurements of eviction and fences are not enough to solve the problem of hundreds of asylum seekers forced to wait up to four weeks before they can apply for international protection. After the removal of spontaneously made up camps last year, hundreds of asylum seekers who arrived in the city have for months stayed in houses provided by speculators, paying up to 100 euro just for a mattress on the floor. These alternative accommodations to the camps have given less visibility to this phenomena but the problem of asylum seekers, being forced to wait to be identified in order to receive accommodation has never been solved.

Messina, controversy on the reception of unaccompanied minors and on the tent camp of Pala Nebiolo

Many of the articles regarding the diatribe between the major of Messina, Renato Accorinti, and the prefect, Stefano Trotta, on the issue of unaccompanied minors have been published the last days. Two months before the deadline for handing over the management of the facility for unaccompanied minors in the structure of the former Ipab* ‘Scandurra Conservatori Riuniti’ to the cooperative Ahmed, the communal administration has been accused once again by the prefecture of being completely disinterested with regard to the reception situation of unaccompanied minors.