Tens of thousands of migrants have been taking to fields to pick tomatoes and other outdoor-grown crops across Italy at the same time as the country has been engulfed in consecutive heatwaves since the middle of June.

The Italian Meteorological Society said average summer temperatures in Italy between June and August have increased by 1.5C over the last thirty years 1994-2023.

Despite the billions of Euros in revenue generated by the agricultural industry – with Italy one of the world’s biggest exporters of products such as tinned tomatoes – harvesting roles come with low wages, long working hours and a lack of employment rights.

Most of the workers from countries including Bangladesh, India and sub-Saharan Africa are also left living in ghettos and abandoned buildings, say Unions, and are controlled by gangmasters who recruit and keep part of their wages.

“When extreme heat is correlated with criminal activities in agriculture, it is clear that the tragedies we have been telling for so long are actually occurring,” said Fabio Ciconte, director of the food and farming NGO Terra!.

At least 30 people have fainted in Agro Pontino, an area of reclaimed farmland in central Italy, due to the heat since June, said Marco Omizzolo, a sociologist at La Sapienza University of Rome.

Instead of calling ambulances and making medical reports, the employer or gangmaster will place the worker in the shade or give him cold water or coffee before allowing them to continue work.

“Employers and gangmasters hide everything in order to avoid legal problems,” said Omizzolo.

More than 47,000 people are estimated to have died in Europe as a result of last year’s high

temperatures, with more than 12,000 of those in Italy, the highest total across the continent.

But it is unknown how many workers have been injured or died due to extreme heat in Italy. The Italian health and safety body has said in the past that accidents at work attributable to the heat are almost never classified as such, rather as fainting, falls or something similar.

A case in point is Famakan Dembele, 28, a tomato picker in the southern Italian province of Foggia, who died on August 7 last year, but for who the Guardian has been unable to confirm a cause of death.

Here is an excerpt from the article published on The Guardian on Tue 27 Aug 2024 with the bylines Stefania Prandi in Foggia, Deepa Parent, and Tom Levitt

We’ve been researching The Green Gold of Italy or Kiwi Revolution as it’s known locally. In the past few years, the Lazio region has become one of the world’s largest producers of kiwis. Glitter does not always mean gold, however. The kiwi business in Lazio is bittersweet for thousands of farm workers trafficked from Punjab in India.

By following the entire supply chain of workers and Kiwis, from Punjabi villages in India to Italian fields and European consumers, we have discovered an industry based on cheap labor.

Over 50 interviews were conducted with families and traffickers in Punjab, with workers, farmers, and authorities in Lazio, with experts, organizations, and companies that make their profits producing and exporting Green Gold.

The photos below were published by Internazionale, Il manifesto, Al Jazeera, El País, IrpiMedia, Danwatch, The Wire, Taz, and VoxEurope.

Female laborers who pick strawberries, red fruit, and tomatoes that arrived on our tables are not only paid less than men and work long hours, but are sexually harassed, blackmailed, threatened, and raped.

Abuse is underreported. The reporting of these crimes is objectively difficult: it is often impossible to gather evidence and testimony, so justice is unlikely. Women are still assumed, more or less overtly, to be to blame, as they would be the ones to provoke and to take advantage.

Red Gold is an investigative, journalistic, and photographic project that began in 2016 and lasted for three years. In total, more than one hundred and thirty interviews were conducted with female workers, unionists, and associations.

The photos have been published in Al Jazeera, Politiken, Open Society Foundations, Vice, Correctiv, BuzzFeed, Action, Gli Stati Generali, Radiotelevisione Svizzera (RSI), Danwatch, Revue Project, Aggiornamenti Sociali, Il Fotografo, and have received special mentions at the Moscow International Photo Awards, International Photography Awards, Neutral Density Awards, Photogrvphy Festival, Tokyo International Photo Awards.

Photos from this series have been exhibited in several Italian cities, as part of festivals, in libraries, schools, and universities. In 2018, they were screened in Brussels at the European Parliament.

Additionally, Red Gold was part of an investigation I conducted with German journalist Pascale Mueller, published on German websites BuzzFeed and Correctiv.

In 2018, the investigation was nominated for the Austrian Medien Lowin Preis, the German Deutsche Reporterpreis, and won the Otto Brenner Preis and Georg von Holtzbrinck Preis. It won Germany’s most prestigious investigative journalism award, the Nannen Preis, in 2019, as well as the Theodor Wille Heinrich Diedrichsen Journalismuspreis.

The impact of the investigation in Spain. Politicians and prosecutors in Spain called for investigations into the conditions of Huelva’s female laborers after the publication of the articles in Correctiv and BuzzFeed. From Barcelona to Madrid, thousands of protesters have made garrisons and marches in solidarity with the farmworkers in Huelva. Several migrants and Spanish farm workers in Huelva filed complaints in 2018, and 400 Moroccan farm workers demonstrated spontaneously with support from SAT, Sindicato Andaluz de Trabajadores. The protests continued and the autonomous labor union Jornaleras de Huelva en lucha. The UN sent an inspector to report on the situation.

The impact in Switzerland and Germany. Aldi Süd stopped buying strawberries from the accused companies in 2018. An internal investigation has been conducted by one of the most prominent certifiers of global food assurance standards, Global GAP. Several international associations and NGOs, including Switzerland’s Solifonds, have decided to financially support the farmworkers’ struggle through grassroots associationism and other actions.

When their mothers are far away, boys and girls become “white orphans.” Save The Children recently published a report that shows more than half a million children in Romania alone had one parent emigrate abroad.

Missing their mothers is difficult, especially for long periods of time. Bulgarian and Romanian teachers and administrators talk about sadness that can turn into anger.

Some students have difficulty concentrating in class and risk dropping out. When adolescence arrives, some turn to alcohol or other psychotropics for consolation.

Being away from their children is also exhausting and painful for mothers. In order to give their children a better future, they intend to leave the country where they live because there are no opportunities for them. As a result of stress, psychological and psychiatric disorders.

Those Faraway Mothers chronicles intensive agriculture’s effects on women from Eastern countries. The reportage was shot in Calabria, Sicily, Basilicata, Apulia, Romania and Bulgaria, with interviews with laborers, psychologists, historians, unionists, teachers and principals.

The photos were published by Al Jazeera, IrpiMedia and Action Aid.

As female migrant workers pick strawberries, they are frequently abused, isolated, and sexually harassed.

Meryem tells the story of her boss forcing her into forced sexual relations. “When I refuse, he makes me miss work days and lose my pay.” Similar testimonies were reported by three other Moroccan women. ” Women seeking work are often pressured by their supervisors to provide sex in exchange.”

Saeeda suffered a miscarriage at work and bled out for a month before seeing a doctor. My clothes were covered in blood while I picked strawberries, but the supervisor refused to help me.”

During working hours, Elena and her coworkers couldn’t go to the bathroom, so they ran into nearby bushes. When they were discovered, they could not work for the next three days.

For this investigation, I met and interviewed 16 laborers working for seven large exporters who sell strawberries in major supermarkets in the United Kingdom, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Sweden.

The impact in Denmark. As a result of this investigation, which was published on Danwatch and Al Jazeera, Denmark’s largest labor union 3F collaborated with representatives of large supermarket chains (such as Germany’s Lidl or Aldi) and Spanish labor organizations such as CCOO. The purpose was to investigate working conditions and inform large companies and distributors about the products they distribute.

According to 3F, a pact similar to the so-called “Bangladesh Accord” needed to be negotiated between European retailers, Spanish unions, and female workers with clear guidelines and penalties for violations.

In March 2022 Salling Group and Coop, Denmark’s largest supermarket chains, suspended imports of red fruits from companies where abuses had been detected.

 “I’m waiting for April when the waves calm down and the sea gets better. In 20 hours from Libya, we can reach the Italian coast where they will rescue us. I know it is risky, but I am not afraid.” Batha is 27 years old and from Asmara, the Eritrean capital. Two years ago, he arrived at the Ethiopian capital without documents but, by the spring, he will have enough money to take the boat. He tried twice to reach Libya but was stopped in Sudan and sent back. “My father has been imprisoned for four years. He is a political opponent and I don’t know anything about him. In Addis, life is better than in my country, but finding a good job is hard. I want to take my chances.”

Batha’s testimony and pictures are among the many I have collected.

When Eritrean refugees move to Addis Ababa, they discover a capital city that is moving through one of the fastest rates of urban growth in the world, and whose current population of 4.5 million is expected to double by 2040. Everything is under construction. While some of them decide to stay, most try to leave for Northern Europe, Switzerland, Germany, or Canada. Italy or Spain, in their plans, would only be transit countries. Aman, 47, decided to stay to help other Eritreans. He is the son of a Protestant pastor and was jailed for three years in Eritrea. “It was the most painful experience of my life. Here I feel like I am at home, in a certain way. We have the same culture and language.”

The feature was completed in 2016. Photos were published by El País, Al Jazeera, Pagina 99, and Azione.

There are many women masons in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital, in their 20s and 30s. Several people have recently moved to the city, while others have been here for some time. In the past, they worked in factories or as maids in private homes. Construction sites are not easy to work on, but they are better than other informal jobs, and unemployment, is a real danger in big cities. An average monthly salary of 66 euros includes Sundays.

Among the bricks, sacks of cement, and trowels, life begins at dawn: shifts begin as early as six a.m. Bricklayers live in sheet metal shacks and walk the stretches not covered by buses at three in the morning. They work eight to nine hours and take a half-hour lunch break. Some bring food from home, others spend half a dollar to eat injera and shirò, the typical Ethiopian dish made with water, teff flour (a protein cereal grown in the Ethiopian highlands that is becoming fashionable in the West) chickpeas and vegetables. They buy lunch in makeshift shacks near construction sites, where cooks cook from morning to night, often with the assistance of their children.

Addis Ababa is growing rapidly. Roads, buildings, and bridges are taking the place of shacks and camps, contributing to unprecedented development. Ethiopia has the fastest economic growth rate in the world, according to the World Bank.

The urban landscape is marked by road construction sites and buildings under construction, despite a weak base (Ethiopia has the third largest infrastructure deficit in Africa).

The pictures were taken in 2016, and were published in the Swiss magazine Azione.

By using the collaborative photojournalism technique, the images evoke the stories of four women (Azadeh, Beatrice, Laura, Marina) who survived femicide.

It is through portraits, photographs of objects, and words that the mechanisms of male violence are revealed.

The exhibition arrived at the European Parliament on 22 November 2024 after stopping in ten secondary schools in Calabria, Puglia, Lazio, Emilia-Romagna, Piedmont and Lombardy. The exhibition is an integral part of a project that aims to identify and overcome negative stereotypes and justifications for violence against women.

Every sixty hours, a woman is killed in Italy. The number of murders is decreasing, but ‘femicide’, the killing of women by their partners, ex-partners, or other family members, is on the rise. The majority of the time, crimes are committed by spouses, boyfriends, or ex-partners.

When a woman is killed by a man, not only is her life destroyed, but her entire family is affected as well. There are mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, and children who have to deal with the consequences. Their lives have been destroyed, memories are kept alive by pictures, and children need to be lifted and comforted, alongside legal expenses and court humiliation. Family members have to deal with media that questions victims’ behavior, not the killer’s.

There are an increasing number of families waging daily battles, often unseen to the outside world. Some write books, start petitions, collect funds for awareness-raising campaigns, or engage in online activism. It is their aim to make society understand that what they went through has precise cultural and social roots because there is still a widespread culture of ownership and dominance of women by men.

Through intimate portraits, photos, objects, places, and the look of someone who lives on after femicide and refuses to give in to gender-based violence, The Consequences depicts a community of families spread throughout Italy who refuse to give up. As we look through their eyes, we can see their love for the women who were killed.

The Consequences is a photo exhibition traveling throughout Italy. Also, the exhibition was set up in Switzerland and Luxembourg.

Here is the link to the photo exhibition catalogue: https://www.dry-art.com/fotografia.php

I went walking along the Adda River near Milan as soon as the last lockdown was lifted in 2020. Emily Dickinson’s poems and my contact with nature, suspended by the pandemic, guided me.