Certified illegal work L'espresso, 15/09/06 Fabrizio Gatti The third article in a series on the exploitation of migrant workers in southern Italy analyses the tomato industry's practices and how ruling out exploitation is virtually impossible for even the biggest players. Gatti also shows how 'ghost farms' benefit from unemployment benefits and are able to exploit migrant workers. THIS IS AN ABRIDGED TRANSLATION OF THE ORIGINAL ARTICLE. Not all Italian canning industries buy tomatoes from firms who savagely exploit migrant workers, but no company can affirm that their tomatoes have been picked exclusively by workers whose basic social and labour rights have been respected. An internal report produced by retail giant Coop Italia states that “Italians do not accept jobs picking tomatoes for industrial use, either in Puglia or in any other Italian region”. Migrant labourers working illegally and who cannot obtain residence permits due to restrictive annual quotas may thus be “subject to all kinds of abuse and blackmail”. This year's annual quota for migrant farm labourers for the whole region of Puglia is 1,600. 5,000 workers – or 7,000, according to credible estimates - have found work in the province of Foggia alone. A handful have residence permits, but the majority are illegal migrants controlled by gang masters. Coop Italia, which prides itself on its range of fair trade products, has adopted social responsibility standards on labour and basic human rights developed by the New York-based NGO Social Accountability International. Suppliers are expected to adhere to the standards and ensure the firms they are buying from do so too. Riccardo Bagni, vicepresident of Coop Italia and in charge of product quality, admits that before 2004 Coop Italia had no idea they should be asking their Italian suppliers to adhere to the social responsibility protocol. “We began to carry out inspections on our supply chain when we heard about a Médecins Sans Frontières report on agricultural workers in the south”. Bagni also states that Coop Italia is not concerned about whether workers involved in its supply chain are illegal migrants or not. “The important thing”, he says, “is that all workers, be they illegal migrants or not, are paid a dignified wage and have a place where they can stay”. Coop Italia now claims that external inspectors certify that products on sale in supermarkets across Italy do not violate the standards fair trade goods are expected to adhere to. As from 2007 all firms supplying Coop Italia will have to sign contracts which include a paragraph on workers' rights. Mechanized harvesting will be further encouraged. The problem, according to Lillo Scarpa, a former tomato producer in the province of Bari, is that police inspections only target farms registered with the local chamber of commerce, not the “ghost farms” whose owners are registered as seasonal farm labourers. The official owners are often local 80-year-olds while the real owners work every other day and claim unemployment benefits for the days they say they found no employment, reaping 7 to 10,000 euro a year in benefits. Some of these farms, Scarpa claims, have no official owners at all, and these, he says, are the firms mostly likely to exploit migrants. Scarpa says that everyone in the area knows how the system works, but that “no town councillor intervenes because these farm owners control votes”. The high numbers of bogus unemployed Italian farm labourers have an impact on migrant quotas for Puglia, which have to take the number of local people willing to take up these jobs into account. The Green Party and the Committee for the protection of human rights plan to start a campaign on the issue. Green MP Tana de Zulueta says that “the state's response in Puglia has so far been directed solely at the immigrants, with illegal workers being expelled, whereas we must seek to involve consumers, the only ones who can exercise any power over producers”.

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