Part 1: Italian colonialism and agriculture

Fascist agrarian policies

In rural 19th and early 20th century Italy, a feeling of common care prevailed and informed intracommunity support and maintenance of the natural environment for long term-growth. This approach can be summarized through the concept of “campanellismo”, which meant that individuals were tied to their city and natural surroundings were not privatized, but rather seen as a shared good. For instance, farming communities had the right to define their local land tenure rules, and access to local rivers, forests and streams was a common right.3 When capitalist agriculture was introduced, these dynamics started changing. The conceptualization of nature shifted towards equating land to profit, which was a result of the privatization of land4

The projects and policies designed by the Fascist government illustrate this shift. As Italy was unified in 1861, it it a relatively young state, therefore the control of agricultural modernization was partly idealized as the method for creating an Italian national sentiment both in Italy and in its colonies.

Under Mussolini’s regime, a series of “Bonifica” projects began across Italy. These were large infrastructural projects who aim was cleansing and reclaiming marshes into arable agricultural land with internal re-settlement schemes. The narrative around entire swamp landscapes associated waste land to unproductivity, which was the supreme nemesis of capitalistic ideals. Moral prejudices and economic conviction were projected as new meaning onto the land and its people: for instance, local rural communities were seen as dirty pests5 and the marshes as malaria-ridden, unhygienic and in need of cleansing. These projects also included the design of new towns for re-settled families.6 Families from the north of Italy were relocated to the south. For example, families from the Veneto region were moved to the Agro Pontino Marches near Rome. The second most important project was in the Tavogliere della Puglia, in the southeast region One of the fascist cities built with it was Borgo La Serpe, now Borgo Mezzanone.

Libya and the Southern question

In parallel to the “Bonifica” projects on national territory, similar efforts were carried out in the African colonies, agriculture being one of the main tenets of the colonial enterprise. The increase in population at the end of 19th century and the challenge of domestic agriculture to satisfy demand pushed King Vittorio Emanuele’s government to expand its colonizing mission to East African countries.7 Following the same path as

3 Joshua B. Forrest, Local Autonomy as a Human Right: The Quest for Local Self-Rule, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers 2022

4 Alvaro Sevilla-Buitrago, Capitalist Formations of Enclosure: Space and the Extinction of the Commons, Antipode, 47, 999– 1020, (2005),

<https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/action/showCitFormats?doi=10.1111%2Fanti.12143>

5 Irene Peano, Specters of Eurafrica in an Italian Agroindustrial Enclave, E-flux Architecture (October 2021), < https://www.e-flux. com/architecture/coloniality-infrastructure/411213/specters-of-eurafrica-inan-italian-agroindustrial-enclave/>

6 Mary T. Boatwright & Mia Fuller, Colonial Cities and Imperial Citizens, Lecture webinar, 24 February 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xrVtGMGqyA

7 Mohanty, ibid, p.950 other European colonizers, Italy sought colonies to remediate the challenges of postunification. A considerable number of the southern population started migrating for better economic opportunities abroad. This “exodus” felt humiliating to the newly born Italian state who wanted to assert its power against other European nations. Italy began losing a considerable part of its labour power and saw in its colonies the potential of relocating these populations through agricultural schemes.

The colonial campaign in Libya and Eritrea were planned as solutions to the southern question. In Eritrea, the Italian government appointed deputy Leopold Franchetti in 1889 to produce reports on the state of land. He described land as abandoned, villages vacant and the natives as having no major ties to the land. These statements were used to justify violent expropriation policies in the Eritrean highlands8, playing into similar narrative of indigenous mismanagement of land by other colonizing nations9 .

In colonial Libya, the landscape was instrumentalized on a political level with the idea of reconstructing the idealized image of the Roman Empire. Indeed, botanical similarities between the two regions marked the heritage of ancient Rome, implicitly stating that the land inherently belonged to Italy. The presence of olive trees in the 1930s echoed ancient texts’ description of a fertile land 10. In a way, the Fascist-era processes of spatial reclamation seemed to draw inspiration, as well as legitimacy, from literature of the Ancient Roman era. While Imperial land was linked to fertility and flourish, the desertic Libyan landscape was exemplified in opposition as consequence of local communities’ inept land management11. This dualistic and simplistic interpretation of the landscape was used to discard the local communities’ way of living (nomadic) and legitimize the violence carried by colonial Italy against them. Indeed, Nomadism was fought against and associated to soil degradation. The Jebel Akhdar (Green Mountain) of Cyrenaica was an extremely fertile region which was chosen by the Italians to become the farmer-settler utopia. Bedouin communities were forced into open air camps where many lost their lives.12 Settler colonial agriculture was pedestalled as the ultimate model for the obtention of land ownership and identity. This process of reclamation was carried out by the opening of the Experimental Agrarian Institute of Sidi Mesri in Tripolania, where Italian agronomists were sent to test the soil. Today, land remains at the core of nationalist Italian politics, where spatial strategies are employed to segregate and entrench migrant communities from mixing with white Italian society.

8 Mohanty, Pramod Kumar, and Aron Andemichael. “Colonialism in Africa: a case of Italian land policy in Eritrean Highlands ” Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, vol. 71, 2010, pp. 950–58, <http://www.jstor.org/stable/44147563.> Accessed 12 Apr. 2022.

9 Brenna Bhandar, Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land, and Racial Regimes of Ownership, Duke University press, (May 2018) , Introduction, p.3.

10 Michele Monserrati, The Barren Mediterranean: Rural Imaginary in Italian Colonial Libya, UC Berkeley: California Italian Studies, (2020),

<https://www.academia.edu/44841221/The_Barren_Mediterranean_Rural_Imaginary_in_Italian_Colonia l_Libya>

11 Monserrati, Ibid.

12 Mia Fuller, Tripoli, Libya: Scale and (IM)mobility in the control of colonial territory, February 27, 2017, The Funambulist, Issue 10: Architecture & Colonialism, <https://thefunambulist.net/magazine/10architecture-colonialism/tripoli-libya-scale-immobility-control-colonial-territory-mia-fuller>

Part 2: Contemporary capitalist agriculture and Italian colonial hangover

Foreign bodies as the new land

The contemporary Italian rural landscape is haunted by a colonial “hangover”, which is pervasive and apparent today in the relationships between state, population, migration flows and agricultural practices.

Prior to capitalism, agriculture was carried out locally by feudal societies and communities who would trade with each other. Colonialism provided Europeans with the opportunity for massive capital accumulation, which colonizers used to dissolve feudal relations in Europe, destroy competing proto-capitalist communities outside Europe, and thus hone on their capacity to accumulate power.13 This political and economic advantage is still present today in the setting of unequal power-dynamics between European countries and the global south. Indeed, this imbalance is specifically disguised through international standards, global trade and border policies that derive from post-colonial independence deals: to actively participate in international trade, newly sovereign African countries were cornered into abiding by the rules and trading norms set in place by Western powers.

The global trade of tomato products between Italy and Ghana is illustrative of the neocolonial dynamic of the free trade system and the violence of supply chain capitalism. In the region of Puglia, southeast of Italy, seasonal migrant workers are exploited by “caporale” systems, which consists of mafia landowners who recruit migrants without regular work and/or residency permits These workers, some of which are originally from Ghana, pick tomatoes under exploitative circumstances, which are then canned by Italian companies (such as Salsa14) that export them back to Ghana15 .

West Africa is an extremely lucrative market for Italy since Ghanaian culture shares a long tradition of cooking with tomato Portuguese and Spanish conquistadores brought tomato to West Africa and the Mediterranean around the 15th century by way of colonial routes. The EPA Agreement (Economic Partnership agreement) of the EU-ACP created a free trade market between Europe and the African Caribbean Pacific Countries; however, it did not guarantee full reciprocity since EU agriculture is heavily subsidies and its Sanitary and Phytosanitary Standards (see illustration 2) ultimately make it incredibly hard for Ghanaian products to enter the European market. In addition, Italian tomato paste benefits from extremely low taxes on import, which gives Italy a competitive advantage over local Ghanaian production of tomatoes.

The tomato plantations in Puglia, and the Ghetto towns within it, isolate the community of migrants from the nearby cities. These settlements are an architectural response to a series of policies and dynamics: the negation of residency permits leads to un-official

13 Blaut, J. M. “Colonialism and the Rise of Capitalism.” Science & Society, vol. 53, no. 3, 1989, pp. 260–96, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40404472. Accessed 14 Apr. 2022.

14 ‘Salsa Product - the Tomato Paste 100% Italian’. [n.d.-b]. Www.salsaproduct.com <http://www.salsaproduct.com/eng/> [accessed 17 April 2022]

15 DW Documentary. 2020. ‘Tomatoes and Greed – the Exodus of Ghana’s Farmers | DW Documentary’, YouTube <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlPZ0Bev99s> [accessed 20 October 2021] work contracts, “oral” recruitment, and vulnerability in the workplace16 . Migrant workers are not offered accommodation, and the difficulty of access to transport forces them to live in precarious conditions in proximity to the plantations. Moreover, migrants are often faced with racism when attempting to rent apartments in the city17 , which excludes them from the housing market. All these processes further the “othering” tactics that aggravate migrants’ invisibility, perpetuating and fuelling racism within Italian society towards black and brown peoples.

The seasonal nature of harvests causes migrant workers to live in of constant mobility between farms. Their mistreatment is hidden, geographically dispersed, and disconnected from everyday urban life, building upon a “politics of distant suffering”18 that echoes the violence enacted on the colonized populations abroad, without being perceived or acknowledged by Italian nationals. To an extent, the fear and war against nomadism may be revived from the Bedouin communities in Libya to the migrant communities of today. The strategic creation of the itinerant migrant worker plays into the colonial and capitalistic rhetoric of rejecting non-settled communities.19 Workers on plantations can only sell their labour power without owning their means of production, which is exemplified by the Italian term for harvest pickers, “braccianti”, which derives from “braccia” meaning “arms” or “arm-peoples”. Indeed, this economic model has not so much been changed, but rather remolded to fit into a new supply chain and type of production.

Harvest work is paid based on the amount of product migrants manage to accumulate in a crate (7 cents/ 1 kg of tomatoes20) rather than by hourly standards and a formal paycheck that would guarantee social support. The shift from colonial agriculture to contemporary practices restructures the extraction to happen directly in Italy over the “foreign” body. In the agro-alimentary sector in Italy, the migrant is exploited directly on national territory in a way that divorces the Italian soil from the “foreign” body who labors it, creating a metaphorical no man’s land in which foreign labor can be exploited because workers are not formally recognized by the nation, have no claim over the territory, and can thus be silenced in the eyes of the law.

16 Is.cco. 2017. ‘The Dark Side of Italian Tomato’, Vimeo <https://vimeo.com/198180150> [accessed 17 October 2021]

17 Interview with Paola Farcella from Diritti a Sud (non-profit organization offering legal advice to migrants), Nardò, Puglia, December 2021

18 Scalia, Laura J. Review of Distant Suffering: Morality, Media and Politics, by L. Boltanski

Political Psychology, vol. 22, no. 1, 2001, pp. 199–202, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3791912. [Accessed 15 Apr. 2022.]

19 Stephanie Malia Hom, Empire’s Mobius Strip: Historical Echoes in Italy’s Crisis of Migration and Detention, Cornell University Press, (2019)

20 ‘Caporalato, Continua La Polemica in Puglia: “Pomodoro a 7 Centesimi al Chilo”’. 2016. L’Immediato <https://www.immediato.net/2016/06/25/caporalato-continua-la-polemica-in-puglia-pomodoro-a-7centesimi-al-chilo/> [accessed 17 November 2021]

Weaponizing soil for nationalist and xenophobic claims

The invisibility of migrant labor and the romanticization of the “made in Italy” slogan illudes us that agriculture is practiced solely by Italian farmers, following local cultivation practices and traditions.

The construction of whiteness against the foreign body or “other” is a strategy used to reinforce Italian national identity in opposition to “being a migrant”. Therefore, the segregation of migrant workers to Ghetto towns and the attacks on these settlements demonstrate an intent to prevent these communities from participating, and most importantly belonging, to Italian society.

As previously mentioned, the tomato embodies the pride of Italian culture and cuisine, however its history in colonial routes trace the fruit back to its origins in central America. The (unquestioned) obsession with certain products such as tomatoes as nationalistic signifiers restricts the multiple historical realities and cultural lifeworlds21 that are entangled within its production.

The tension between border control and the inflow of migration is creating an inextricable link between nationality and soil. However, political attitudes and EU immigration policies expose a double standard when it comes to conceptualizing migration. In December 2019, the Minister for Internal Affairs Luciana Lamorgese at the local Committee for Order and Public Security in Foggia, spoke of the ghettos as a “plight” that needs to be dealt with. She claimed:

“I deem it necessary to have a bonifica, a bonifica of immigration, because we deal with the issue as one of emergency… but when emergency is every day, it is structural… Maybe we could have a quota system, because they come anyways, and we need them anyways, for the harvests, at certain periods in the year, we need a long-term vision.”

This quote highlights the dependence of the Italian agro-alimentary sector on undocumented migrants. Few months later a decree “Decreto Rilancio: Art.110 bis 13.05.2020: Emersione di rapporti di lavoro” was released, stating where undocumented migrants could apply for permits. The decree proposed a temporary work permit lasting six months: either through self-declaration by the employer or thanks to a job search permit23. However, the process and numbers for applying for permits was limited in

21 “A phenomenological concept (sometimes written as life-world) referring to the everyday world of the shared, ongoing flow of experience, from which we constitute objects and abstract concepts” Scott, John, and Gordon Marshall. "lifeworld." A Dictionary of Sociology : Oxford University Press, . Oxford Reference. Date Accessed 13 Apr. 2022

<https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780199533008.001.0001/acref-9780199533008-e1273>

22 Irene Peano, Specters of Eurafrica in an Italian Agroindustrial Enclave, E-flux Architecture (October 2021), < https://www.e-flux. com/architecture/coloniality-infrastructure/411213/specters-of-eurafrica-inan-italian-agroindustrial-enclave/>

23 Laura Filios, Braccianti agricoli: regolarizzazione primo passo contro la criminalità, Osservatorio Diritti online journal (14 May 2020) < https://www.osservatoriodiritti.it/2020/05/14/braccianti-agricolicoronavirus-lavoro-immigrati-decreto-rilancio/> relation to the number of individuals in precarious conditions who would benefit from such papers. This decree seems to be a post-rationalized solution for amending a broken system.

Industrial agribusinesses and its infrastructure’s final goal is the accumulation of wealth, rather than a strategy towards social good24 The care for soil and people is being lost to profit driven agricultures. Within this framework, the soil is also seen as something to exploit and dominate through the widespread abuse of chemicals that prevent the soil from regenerating.25 This kind of agricultural model is regimented and orchestrated by supply chain capitalism and its consequent social organizations, rather than seasonal and traditional cultivation practices. These unequal supply chains construct the social order we live in.

The industrial agricultural field is immediately contingent to the delimitation of borders. In Border as method or the Multiplication of Labour, Sandro Mazzadro and Brett Neilson analyse how the hardening of borders creates the condition under which the continuation of exploitative practices is made possible in a post-slavery global order26 . European countries, such as Italy, are capitalizing on cheap migrant labour: wealth accumulation relies on politics of racism, and subjects are racialized define who can belong to the nation-state, and who is excluded, and can thus be subordinated to cultivating the soil.27 European immigration policies legitimize border violence, as if the cause of migration was not linked to the presence of Europe abroad through global trade policies and corporations.

Through the tomato case study (see illustration 2), we can see that economic migration from Ghana to Italy represents an ongoing vicious cycle within the agricultural industry: trade policies are crafted to benefit the West, which gives European agricultural products advantage on the Ghanaian market, making the country unable to rely in its own agricultural production and dependent on European imports. Given the meagre economic opportunities offered on national level, Ghanaians are prompted to migrate elsewhere in the hope for better economic opportunities, but they are ultimately trapped as undocumented workers in Italian tomato plantations, cultivating products that will be shipped back to their home country. In addition to this cross-border destruction of livelihoods, migrant workers are further rendered legally invisible in the agricultural process due to their lack of connection to Italian nationality.

Border violence (mistreatment in detention camps, rejection at border, racism…) represents an injustice given the fact that Ghanaians are pushed to migrate because of this vicious cycle initiated by western global trade policies.

24 Matheus Hoffmann Pfrimer and Ricardo César Barbosa Júnior, Neo-Agro-Colonialism, Control over Life, and Imposed Spatio-Temporalities, February 2017, Contexto Internacional 39(1):3-33

25 Interview with Federico Ascheri, Italian agronomist, over the phone, December 2021

26 “The control of labor mobility is also one of the key sites where the expanding frontiers of capital continue to intertwine with political and legal borders. Here the production of labor power as a commodity is a key issue.” From Borders as Method, Chapter 3: Frontiers of Capital

27 Brenna Bhandar, Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land, and Racial Regimes of Ownership, Duke University press, (May 2018)