In our series of letters from African journalists, Ismail Einashe meets African olive pickers who live in poverty and work for team leaders for meager wages in Italy.
The town of Campobello di Mazara on the Italian island of Sicily overlooks rows of olive trees covering verdant fields. Farm trucks zoom past with crates overflowing with plump green olives.
But a few steps from this idyllic sight is something much darker: a grimy makeshift encampment that looks like a refugee camp.
The Campobello di Mazara olive groves produce the Nocellara del Belice variety, popular in delicatessens across Europe.
Known as the “ghetto”, it is home to hundreds of African migrant farm workers, most of whom are from Gambia, Senegal and Tunisia.
Such “ghettos” housing mainly African agricultural workers also exist in other parts of Italy, such as Puglia in the south. The UN estimates that between 450,000 and 500,000 irregular migrants work in the country’s agricultural sector, around half of the total workforce.
In Italian, ‘Campobello’ means ‘beautiful countryside’, but looking around the camp you see nothing but squalor and one-room shacks built from wooden doors, plastic and metal. discarded, like old olive tins.
The locals are wary of strangers and few are willing to talk when we visit.
A Senegalese man washes meat with his bare hands in a large pot full of dirty water as he prepares lunch, another man carves a sheep and
a third feeds lambs with milk from a water bottle in plastic.
Most of the ghetto residents are Muslims and raise lambs which they slaughter for their halal meat
To the rear of the camp is a large open space filled with piles of rubbish and a makeshift shower room that can be hired for $1 (£0.85) and a bucket of water bought for $1.
The building was built by Boja, a Gambian migrant who only wants to give his first name and who settled here in 2017. He originally came to work in the olive groves, but has since used his skills in carpentry to become the builder of the camp. He erects the shacks which are rented out to workers for $100 a month.
But the inhabitants of the huts live in grim conditions: there is no running water, no sewage system and no electricity. We light fires to cook and protect ourselves from the cold of the night, explains Boja.
A heatwave job
Every year still, up to more than 1,000 migrants – without official papers – fill this informal camp to work for black market masters at the olive harvest from September to November.
Farmers here grow the Nocellara del Belice olive, considered one of the best table olives in the world. They have to employ many people to hand-pick them to ship to expensive delis and supermarkets around the world.
Boja has been living in the Campobello di Mazara ghetto for four years and became the builder of the camp.
The team leader system, known as ‘caporalato’, means migrants don’t work directly for farmers – and their illegal status means they’re incredibly cheap for companies, who pay them just as little only $2 an hour.
Boja says the ghetto can be a dangerous place – drug dealing and prostitutes are commonplace – and even the police don’t venture into the camp, which partially burned down last year, killing a young migrant called Omar Baldeh and leaving hundreds more homeless.
Yet the nearby town of Campobello di Mazara is eerily empty of residents, its streets lined with barricaded houses. Sicily has long been a place of emigration, with its inhabitants seeking work opportunities in northern Italy and the rest of Europe.
At night, the city comes alive with a few take-out pizzerias and cafes where Tunisian and Senegalese migrants sit outside to smoke cigarettes and drink coffee.
Campobello di Mazara is a strange town, full of empty and condemned houses.
People are doing whatever it takes to survive in the ghetto, says Boja, who finds it too difficult to talk about the losses caused by the fire.
To commemorate the first anniversary of the fire, African migrants marched in Campobello di Mazara last month with Italian activists to demand better conditions for camp residents.
One of the participants in the protest was Issa, a Gambian migrant who did not want to give his full name. He lives in Puglia, where he spent two years in the large ghetto of Foggia, where more than 1,500 migrants live.
He also complained about the way African migrants are treated by gang leaders, who force them to work long hours in excessive heat.
Kate Stanworth
You have to wake up and go to work, no matter how hot.”
In June 2021, Camara Fantamadi, a 27-year-old Malian farm worker, died after picking tomatoes in the scorching Apulian sun.
“No matter how hot it is, when you go to Puglia you will see Africans working on the farms,” says Issa.
Even on the hottest days, when it is easily 40°C and the migrants prefer not to go to the fields, the team leader does not give in, calling to say: “Issa, where are you, why are you don’t you come to work?”
He adds: “You have to get up and go to work, no matter how hot it is.”
This reflects how African migrants are bearing the brunt of Italy’s escalating climate crisis. Sicily is the epicenter of heatwaves in Europe, where the hottest temperatures on record on the continent were recorded at 48C in 2021.
Mustapha Jarjou, 24, spokesman for the association of the Gambian community in Palermo, the capital of Sicily, explains that the irony of fate is that many of those who cross the Mediterranean to reach Europe do so to escape the lack of opportunity created by climate change in Africa.
They can’t survive without us
Before the pandemic, a UN expert denounced the exploitation of agricultural workers “by Italy’s sophisticated food system” and condemned the way undocumented migrants were “left in limbo”.
Farmers can be prosecuted for hiring site supervisors
Italian authorities say attempts have been made to stem team bosses in recent years.
The system was made illegal in 2011, and in 2016 farmers who use a team leader could face jail time, although the law does not appear to apply to undocumented migrants.
During the pandemic, the government issued work permits to thousands of irregular migrants to help farmers cope with labor shortages.
But with a new far-right government coming to power last month, there are concerns that further amnesties for undocumented migrants will not be on the cards.
An undocumented Senegalese worker, who asked not to be named and who worked for many years as a seasonal agricultural worker in Tuscany, came to Sicily this year when he learned he could earn around $60 a day .
The labor shortage and the impact of Covid have led to a slight increase in wages.
His 12-hour shift begins at 6 a.m. and he hopes to earn $5 per crate of olives he picks up. He aims to complete at least 10 a day.
The work is hard, hot and unforgiving, but it’s the only job available to immigrants like him, he says.
He thinks Italians don’t realize how essential migrants are to this food-loving country: “They can’t survive without us – we grow their food.”
