A-Infos (en) Italy, FAI, Umanita Nova #5-26 - And then come the peasants. Dying of cold and labor. (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

Mamadou Sey was 38 years old. A farm laborer, a legal immigrant from 
Gambia. He died on January 23rd in his car, parked at the entrance to 
the Torretta Antonacci settlement, in the Foggia province. He had taken 
refuge inside the car to protect himself from the cold. The car was the 
only "home" he had managed to find.
Natural causes are being discussed. But it's not natural to die of cold 
and starvation in one of Europe's most productive agricultural 
districts, in the heart of a supply chain that generates profits, 
exports, brands, and the primacy of the so-called Made in Italy.
The peasantry has never ended. In the Tavoliere plain of Foggia, history 
has never truly stopped. It has simply recomposed itself in other forms. 
The peasantry of yesterday-hovels, crumbling farmhouses, shacks without 
water or electricity-housed Italian laborers, poor, illiterate, and 
without rights. Today's ghettos house migrant laborers, especially 
Africans, equally vulnerable to blackmail, equally invisible.

Skin color changes, not class relations. Place names change, not their 
function: providing low-cost labor for industrial agriculture, keeping 
workers in a permanent state of housing, legal, and existential 
precariousness.

Torretta Antonacci is not an anomaly. It is a structural device of 
contemporary agrarian capitalism.

Mamadou's is yet another death foretold in the ghettos of the Foggia 
area. People die from burning in shack fires, suffocating from braziers 
lit for warmth, from untreated illnesses, from neglect. The Unione 
Sindacale di Base (Base Union) bluntly calls it state murder.
When institutions have been aware of a situation for years, receiving 
complaints, promises, and reports, and continue to fail to intervene, 
responsibility is not inevitable but a political choice.

Torretta Antonacci should have been overcome thanks to PNRR funding. Of 
the EUR200 million allocated nationwide for the elimination of slums, 
only EUR24.8 million will actually be spent. For the large ghettos of 
Foggia-Torretta Antonacci and Borgo Mezzanone-nothing.

Money evaporated, system intact. Those funds could have guaranteed 
decent housing for Mamadou and thousands of other workers. Instead, they 
were squandered amid administrative inertia, bureaucracy, and a lack of 
political will, leaving intact the mechanism that breeds exploitation 
and marginalization.

Mamadou, like thousands of other workers, has lived for years trapped 
between blocked permit renewals, illegitimately requested documentation, 
and slowed or blocked procedures.

Bureaucracy purposefully produces irregularities. This isn't 
disorganization. It's the institutional production of irregularities, a 
situation that makes workers more vulnerable to blackmail, more docile, 
and more easily exploited in the fields.

Housing insecurity is compounded by legal insecurity.

The issue of housing for farmworkers is treated as a public and 
emergency issue. But this approach is misleading. Housing is not a 
collateral need: it is an integral part of the employment relationship. 
Housing is not assistance: it is wages. Agricultural businesses that 
employ thousands of seasonal workers know perfectly well that those 
workers lack local housing. Continuing to hire them without guaranteeing 
them decent housing means deliberately shifting the cost of reproducing 
the workforce onto the workers themselves, volunteers, or the community.

Ghettos exist not so much because the state doesn't do enough, but 
because businesses can produce and make profits without taking 
responsibility for the living conditions of the workers they exploit. 
Until housing is recognized as an obligation for companies-on a par with 
wages, safety, and social security-any public intervention will remain a 
palliative.

Flai Cgil and CGIL Foggia also reiterate this: without a clear political 
will to overcome ghettos, we will continue to count the victims. What 
may appear to be an emergency is actually a system. Ghettos lower wages, 
strengthen gangmasters and crime, guarantee profits for the 
agri-industrial sector, and create social invisibility. And invisibility 
is a form of control.

On January 29, a delegation of residents of Torretta Antonacci went to 
the Prefecture of Foggia, requesting a meeting with the Prefect and 
concrete answers.

The demands put forward remain clear and non-negotiable: housing for all 
agricultural workers; regular and dignified work; documentation and 
compliance with international protection legislation; immediate use of 
PNRR funds; and an end to exploitation and gangmasters.

Mamadou Sey didn't die by accident. He died because this system 
considers some lives expendable. He died because vulgarity was never 
eliminated: it was simply pushed to the margins, made invisible.

Totò Caggese

https://umanitanova.org/e-poi-vengono-i-cafoni-morire-di-freddo-e-bracciantato/
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