Convenors
Timothy Raeymaekers, University of Bologna
Giuseppe Grimaldi, University of Trieste
Over the past decade, anti-gangmastering legislation in Italy has been predicated on the idea that formalizing (i.e., rendering legible and accountable to the state) the production of agri-food commodities will automatically eradicate the most extreme forms of labour exploitation. Pushed forward by an imagery of thuggish informal labour intermediaries (gangmasters, or caporali), recent policy interventions in the domain of commodity trade and production, and of migrant housing, amongst others, have targeted companies, workers, and public institutions with the aim of increasing accountability in the sector. Formalization efforts thus publicly aim at both redressing the “victims of labour exploitation” and the territories where this exploitation occurs.
Italian Anti-caporalato measures can be represented as an integral part of a development paradigm that has historically shaped interventions targeting Italy’s rural areas around tropes of backwardness, underdevelopment, and state avoidance. This development paradigm is not unique to Italy but represents one concrete way in which agricultural commodity frontiers generate important frictions, or awkward engagements (Tsing, 2005, p. xi), between labour, the state, and capital, and between the variety of actors — from farmworkers to agrobusinesses, local institutions, and social workers to the caporali themselves — who tend to construct social practices and careers in a context of rapidly changing institutions and values.
The aim of this panel is not only to test these awkward outcomes of public interventions in the domain of agri-food labour empirically, but also to open a wider, comparative discussion about the grounds of persistent labour exploitation in the agri-food sector more broadly, and beyond the Italian context. We particularly welcome papers that build on recent qualitative research in the domain of rural development interventions that target agri-food labour. We particularly welcome papers that address the political urgency of labour exploitation in the agri-food sector from an original and engaged methodological and/or theoretical viewpoint.
Open questions
- the differentiation between «free» and «unfree» labour, and between the relations of production and reproduction
- the impact of policy interventions on illegalized labour intermediation and on migrant workers’ social networks
- The ways in which the ideological construction of rural spaces inform current rural development policies in the domain of agri-food labour
- The frictions between institutionally driven formalization of labour processes and social practices of labour supply
Keywords
agri-food; labour; migration; formalization; rural development.
Sub-disciplines or cross-disciplinary areas of concern
social anthropology; human geography; sociology of labour; urban planning; development sociology; sociology of law.
References
Tsing, A.L.
2005 Friction: an ethnography of global connection, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.
Convenors’ bios
Timothy Raeymaekers is senior tenured Assistant Professor at the University of Bologna’s History and Cultures Department. His research delves into the complex geographies of agri-food and mineral supply chains in Central Africa and the Mediterranean area, with a particular interest in the formalization of informal labour and ownership regimes. Amongst other projects, he has directed research on the racialization of migrant labour in Italy’s agri-food industry and on the impact of due diligence initiatives (such as those on «conflict minerals») on extractive labour in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Giuseppe Grimaldi is a research fellow in anthropology at the University of Trieste (Department of Humanities). His research topics are focused on children of immigrants, the nexus between agriculture and migration, school dropouts and the relation between memory and subalternity. He has conducted ethnographic research in Italy, Ethiopia, the United Kingdom, and Israel. Amongst other projects he has directed the association Frontiera Sud Aps, a research intervention project on informal intermediation in rural Southern Italy.