Migration and Agriculture

Mobility and change in the Mediterranean area

Alessandra Corrado, Carlos de Castro, Domenico Perrotta, Alessandra Corrado, Carlos de Castro, Domenico Perrotta

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317334392
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Business allgemein

In recent years, Mediterranean agriculture has experienced important transformations which have led to new forms of labour and production, and in particular to a surge in the recruitment of migrant labour. The Mediterranean Basin represents a very interesting arena that is able to illustrate labour conditions and mobility, the competition among different farming models, and the consequences in terms of the proletarianization process, food crisis and diet changes.

Migration and Agriculture brings together international contributors from across several disciplines to describe and analyse labour conditions and international migrations in relation to agri-food restructuring processes. This unique collection of articles connects migration issues with the proletarianization process and agrarian transitions that have affected Southern European as well as some Middle Eastern and Northern African countries in different ways. The chapters present case studies from a range of territories in the Mediterranean Basin, offering empirical data and theoretical analysis in order to grasp the complexity of the processes that are occurring.

This book offers a uniquely comprehensive overview of migrations, territories and agro-food production in this key region, and will be an indispensable resource to scholars in migration studies, rural sociology, social geography and the political economy of agriculture.

1 Cheap food, cheap labour, high profits: agriculture and mobility in the Mediterranean

Introduction

Alessandra Corrado, Carlos de Castro and Domenico Perrotta

1.1 A history of conflicts

A series of dramatic events in early 2000 in a small town in Andalusia starkly revealed to an international public the dire environmental, social and labour conditions in which fresh food was being produced for Europe’s supermarkets. The town in question was El Ejido, the heart of a booming agricultural sector based on intensive greenhouse production that relied on a largely North African and eastern European migrant workforce. The area was already deeply divided by social and racial tensions when in February a young Spanish woman was killed by a mentally ill Moroccan labourer. Her murder sparked a spate of violent attacks against migrants, which led to more than sixty Moroccans being injured and thousands of migrant farm workers going on strike. The events were widely reported by Europe’s main newspapers and prompted a host of investigations by NGOs (Forum civique Européen, 2000, 2002), and academic studies (Checa, 2001; Martinez Veiga, 2001, 2014; Potot, 2008; Caruso, this volume).

El Ejido was not an isolated case. Over the following years, rural areas across the Mediterranean region would be shaken by numerous social and labour conflicts. In July 2005, 250 Moroccan, Tunisian and Chinese seasonal workers in the small town of Poscros in the south of France went on strike to demand unpaid wages and better housing and employment conditions. During the same period, migrant workers recruited through the OMI seasonal contracts successfully campaigned for their legal status in France to be made permanent (Décosse, 2011).

Italy would soon ‘discover’ the dramatic situation of farm workers in its rural areas. In reality, the presence of migrant harvesters in its southern regions had already come to national attention in 1989 after the murder of Jerry Essan Masslo, a South African political refugee employed in the fields of Villa Literno in Campania, who had publicly denounced the apartheid-like conditions in local agriculture. Since this episode, the number of migrant agricultural labourers has steadily grown, but their poor living and working conditions have usually only come to light in similarly dramatic circumstances. In the autumn of 2006, an international scandal broke out over the murder of Polish workers who had been among hundreds of eastern Europeans trafficked for employment in the tomato harvest in Foggia province in northern Puglia. In January 2010, violent riots broke out between migrants and the local population in Rosarno, a small town in Calabria, following the umpteenth attack on sub-Saharan African citrus pickers by local youths. In response, the Italian government sent in the army and 1,500 Sub-Saharan Africans were deported to other regions (Corrado, 2011). In August 2011, around 400 Tunisian and West African watermelon and tomato harvesters went on a two-week strike against their employers and caporali, the illegal farm labour contractors, in Nardò, a small town in southern Puglia (Perrotta and Sacchetto, 2013).

In April 2013, the ugly side of Greek agriculture would also come to light. In Manolada, a small town in the Peloponnese region, hundreds of Bangladeshi strawberry pickers had been demanding unpaid wages. Local employers and supervisors responded by opening fire on the workers and wounding 25 of them. As in the other cases, this was by no means the first episode of violence and conflict to have occurred in an area of intensive agricultural production that supplied the markets of the whole of Europe (Papadopoulos and Fratsea, this volume).

In the meantime, the southern shore of the Mediterranean has not been exempt from rural conflicts. Between December 2011 and April 2013, international media reported the struggles of the agricultural trade union FNSA (Fédération National du Secteur Agricole) and thousands of mainly internal migrant farm workers employed in the Moroccan region of Agadir-Souss Massa Drâa, where intensive and export-oriented agriculture had developed during the previous 30 years. The FNSA accused local farms, many owned by European investors or multinational companies, of not respecting Moroccan legislation on labour and denounced the pressures of European retail corporations upon Moroccan producers and the knock-on effects upon farm workers.

Across the Mediterranean, farmers have been just as actively involved in conflicts as agricultural labourers. Southern European fruit and vegetable producers, especially in Spain and Italy, have organized protests against cheap imports from North Africa and the cheap prices paid by retailers, while French farmers have campaigned against the import of Spanish low-cost produce. In 2016, Greek farmers, fishermen and stockbreeders mobilized against austerity measures planned by the government under pressure from the European Union, the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank. In a different vein, since 2006 the European Coordination of Via Campesina has organized initiatives in many Mediterranean countries in solidarity with peasants and farm workers involved in struggles against neoliberal policies (Confédération Paysanne, 2011, 2015).

The 2011–12 ‘Arab Springs’ in Tunisia and Egypt have also been analysed in terms of their strong connection with food crises, the restructuring of agriculture, and the marginalization and dispossession of rural populations due to neoliberal policies (Ayeb, 2011, 2012a, 2012b; Bush and Ayeb, 2014; Gana, 2012; similarly, see McMichael, 2009 for an analysis of the 2007–2008 food crises in sub-Saharan Africa). In 2011, following the overthrow of the Ben Alì and Gaddafi regimes, tens of thousands of Tunisians and sub-Saharan Africans crossed the Mediterranean to southern Italy, where many found employment in agriculture and some, in fact, became directly involved in the Nardò strike in the summer of the same year.

As the Via Campesina noted, ‘the massive movement of food around the world is forcing the increased movement of people’ (Via Campesina, 2000). In other words, neoliberal policies and the consequent conflicts are a major cause for both internal and transnational mobility. A huge number of dispossessed peasants on the southern shore of the Mediterranean – and in the global South more generally – become migrants on the northern shore where many find work in agriculture (Confédération Paysanne, 2004).

1.2 Mobility and the restructuring of agri-food production

As the conflicts mentioned above reveal, over the last 30 years Mediterranean countries have experienced important changes in food production, distribution and consumption, agricultural labour and markets. The main hypothesis that underpins the chapters of this volume is that these transformations are intimately related to transnational and internal mobility.

On the one hand, the liberalization of international agri-food trade and intellectual property rights on patents and seeds, the reforms of the EU Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), and the dominance of the EU food industry and retailers on Mediterranean farmers and processors are all factors that have contributed, on both sides of the Mediterranean, to the expansion of export-oriented agri-food production, the crisis, dependence and dispossession of small farmers and peasants, the impoverishment of rural populations, conflicts over resources, and pressures on labour conditions. As well as increasing internal mobility, these processes have fostered transnational migration from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), but also from eastern European, sub-Saharan and Asian countries, towards the EU. A considerable number of migrants have moved to southern European rural areas, and have often become casual agricultural labourers.

On the other hand, the availability of cheap and flexible migrant labour has represented a fundamental factor in the restructuring the agricultural sector, both in southern Europe and in a number of MENA countries: the compression of labour costs has enabled, to a certain extent, the resilience of a number of southern European small and medium-size farms squeezed by neoliberal globalization and, more important, has contributed to strengthening the power of ‘food empires’ (Ploeg, 2008) within vertical agri-food supply chains.

This book combines two main research areas in order to analyse the mobility of labourers in relation to agri-food restructuring in the Mediterranean: first, studies of migrant labour in agricultural sector and, second, research on the restructuring of agri-food systems in the context of contemporary capitalism or what has been defined as a ‘neoliberal’ or ‘corporate/environmental food regime’ (McMichael, 2005, 2013; Friedmann, 2005; Pechlaner and Otero, 2008).

Since the late 1980s, and with increased attention from the early 2000s, the social sciences have analysed transnational mobility in the Mediterranean area in relation to national and supranational policies and to the restructuring of labour markets. Despite the growing number of studies on the insertion of migrant workers in agriculture (e.g. Cole and Booth, 2007; Michalon and Morice, 2008; Crenn and Tersigni, 2013; Colloca and Corrado, 2013), comparatively little attention has been dedicated to examining how the vulnerable legal status and social condition of migrants have been essential to the restructuring of Mediterranean agri-food production and its integration in global agri-food chains (Lawrence, 2007; Moraes et al., 2012a; Gertel and Sippel, 2014); a process that occurred earlier in other geographical contexts such as the United States.

Conversely, for many years agri-food and rural studies have paid little interest to labour issues, especially to the question of migrant labour.¹ The incorporation of agricultural production in vertical food chains controlled by transnational corporations, the transformation from producer-driven to buyer-driven food chains (Burch and Lawrence, 2007), the consolidation of retailer power through the supermarket revolution (Reardon et al., 2003; McMichael and Friedmann, 2007), and the financialization of agricultural processes have all reshaped the global agri-food system and the connections between the global North and the global South. But, as Bonanno and Cavalcanti note in their introduction to one of the few edited volumes on the topic,

overall research has moved away from labor as a topic of investigation at a time when the exploitation of labor emerged as one of the primary factors in the restructuring of global agri-food. Also neglected was the topic of labor as an agent of emancipation.

(2014, p. xxv)

The few analyses in this field concentrate on the Americas (e.g. Barndt, 2002; Flora et al., 2011; Harrison and Lloyd, 2011) and, to a lesser extent, northern Europe (Rogaly, 2008).

In Mediterranean agriculture these restructuring processes for the most part have taken place later than in other areas of the world such as the US, northern Europe and Australia (Ortiz-Miranda et al., 2013). Moreover, they have assumed a very specific form, due to the particular structure of agriculture and the history of agrarian relations (Braudel, 1985), as well as a result of the specific role that migration has played in these processes (Corrado, this volume). Through interdisciplinary, empirically based contributions that for the most part draw on ethnographic and other qualitative methods, this book addresses and elaborates this largely missing link between migration studies and agri-food studies, with a specific focus on the Mediterranean region.

Such an analysis needs to consider different forms of regulation: on the one hand, national and supranational politics regarding agri-food production, processing and trade, labour markets and transnational mobility; and, on the other, private standards and certification systems through which transnational corporations of food production, processing and retail claim to regulate issues such as environmental sustainability, food safety and quality, and labour rights. Through this multifaceted regulation, the Mediterranean has become a mobile border, across which capital accumulation occurs through processes of segmentation and ‘differential inclusion’ (Mezzadra and Nielsen, 2013) and where not only labour but also food products are filtered, selected and channelled. By virtue of selective mobility control, the Mediterranean is crossed by documented and undocumented, EU and non-EU, economic and forced, temporary and permanent, male and female migrants. At the same time, as a result of trade policies, partnership agreements and private standards, there are farmers (and products) more or less coping with quality certification schemes and protocols, and more or less integrated into food chains and free trade mechanisms.

The destinies of both sides of the Mediterranean are connected not only through transnational mobility, but also through new competitive relationships embedded in the neoliberal globalization of agri-food systems. Despite the evident differences that exist between the northern and southern shores of the Mediterranean, but also between areas within each side, the region overall appears as a (semi-)periphery in global food systems. In fact, the central nodes of these networks that control capital accumulation – the seed and biotech corporations, food multinationals, big retailers, and financial actors – are usually headquartered far away from the Mediterranean ‘enclaves’ (Moraes et al., 2012b; Pedreño et al., 2015) of export-oriented and labour-intensive production of fruit and vegetables that compete among themselves and with other regions.

In the next sections, we describe four key issues that are developed further in the chapters of this volume: the restructuring of agriculture; trade liberalization and the growing power of retailers in food chains; mobility patterns and labour in agriculture; and the construction of agricultural wage labour markets. The final section provides an overview of the eighteen contributions to the volume.

1.3 Agricultural restructuring

Over the last two centuries, and in contrast to the rest of Europe, southern European agriculture has been characterized by distinctive features with regards to the structure of production and agrarian relations: greater land fragmentation; a higher rate of permanent crops such as olive trees, vineyards and orchards; smaller farms, with low levels of technological development, and, from the 1970s onwards, managed by part-time or elderly farmers. Nevertheless, over the last three decades, the region has undergone significant agrarian change. The number of farms has steadily decreased, as has, to a lesser extent, the utilized agricultural area (UAA), while the average size of farms has grown (Arnalte-Alegre and Ortiz-Miranda, 2013; Papadopulos, 2015).²

A few figures can offer a general idea about these transformations. Between 1990 and 2010, average farm size grew from 5.6 ha of UAA to almost 8 ha in Italy, from 4.3 to 7.2 ha in Greece, from 6.7 to 12 ha in Portugal, and from 15.4 to 24 ha in Spain. In comparison, the average UAA in 2010 was 24 ha in the EU-15 countries and 15 ha in the EU-27 countries. Over the same 20-year period, the number of holdings fell from 2,665,000 to 1,621,000 in Italy, from 861,000 to 723,000 in Greece, from 599,000 to 305,000 in Portugal, and from 1,594,000 to 990,000 in Spain. In France, a dramatic decrease in the number of farms had occurred already in previous decades, and remained at around 500,000 between 1990 and 2000 (Eurostat, 2014a, 2014b; see also Arnalte-Alegre and Ortiz-Miranda, 2013). This reduction is largely due to the drop in the number of small farms.

However, a number of strategies have compensated, to a certain extent, the structural limits of southern European agriculture. These include: non-agricultural income diversification in rural households; qualit...