Quelle: The Guardian | 24.11.2016

African migrants living in squalid tent camps are being paid derisory wages while turning huge profits for gang masters in the olive groves of western Sicily

You can smell the camp before you see it. The stench of rank sewage cuts through the crisp morning air in this quiet corner of western Sicily. From a distance it looks like an open-air dump, festering amid the olive groves. Men emerge from flimsy tents pitched amid piles of rubbish and ramshackle huts made of cardboard and plastic sheets.

This makeshift and filthy encampment is home to 1,200 people. All African refugees and migrants, they are desperately competing for the opportunity to work long hours in the fields as illegal agricultural workers for paltry, exploitative wages. It is autumn in Sicily. There is olive oil to be made.

Migrant labour makes good business sense – both for local farmers and for the “caporali”, labour contractors who recruit men and women to work illegally in Sicily’s agricultural sector. Some African workers say they are being paid just €2 (£1.72) an hour – €7.50 below the legal minimum wage – with no contract or health insurance.

Informal migrant labour camps such as this one in Campobello di Mazara, in Trapani on the west coast of Sicily, are becoming a “phenomenon” according to local migrant rights groups working in the area.

Laws passed last year promise eight-year prison sentences for those recruiting and exploiting migrant workers. Nonetheless, Italian labour unions say that up to 300,000 illegal foreign workers generate billions of euros a year in profit.

The men and women at this camp are all here to work in the nearby olive groves and tomato and aubergine greenhouses, their illegal labour entering the supply chains of Italian goods exported all over the world.

Every morning at 5am, hundreds of migrants wearing sandals and hats crawl out of their tents and shelters, their shoulders clad in blankets, and queue outside the camp waiting for local farmers to collect them in vans and bring them to the fields.

Amadou, a 52-year-old from Senegal, has shared a tiny, thin blue tent with another Senegalese migrant since September. This autumn he hoped to scrape together enough money working the Sicilian olive harvest to get him through the winter.

But work is scarce.

“This morning, they [only] took 100 to work,” says Amadou. He smiles and shakes his head. “Unfortunately, I have been dismissed, even today. They say I’m too old.”

According to the Coldiretti, the main farmers’ organisation in Italy, oil production on the island has hit a record low this year, with a drop of almost 42% on the seasonal average. This means less work and fewer wages for those who do get picked to jump aboard the vans heading out to the fields.

Even if he wanted to go home, Amadou now has no more money to get him there.

“I don’t know what to do,” he says, describing the worsening squalor of the camp as winter closes in. “Many of us are sick. In the evening, you hear a chorus of coughing and moaning. Here there are no doctors or medicines. And there is not even enough food or water. It is a disaster.”

He lives alongside other Senegalese, Gambians, Nigerians and Malians. Many are teenagers who ran away from reception centres desperate to find work.

Valentina Campanella, president of the Sicilian branch of Anolf, an organisation helping migrants and asylum seekers, says that informal migrant tent camps are drawing those most at risk from Sicily’s migrant community.

“There is enormous pressure on existing services,” she says. “The shelters are collapsing and there is no space in the reception centres. Many migrants are willing to do anything to make any money and they are the most vulnerable and easiest to exploit. They have no alternative.”

Many are angry about the situation in which they find themselves.

“Look around,” says Yoro, a 17-year-old boy from Senegal. “That’s what we are: 1,200 slaves. Look at us. Look at our hands. Look at our faces. They are the hands and faces of slavery.”

Yoro’s parents died three years ago. He shows us the big scars on his head, the signs of the violence he suffered in Libya. He crossed the sea and, once in Palermo, ran away from the reception centre. “I needed to work,” he says. “I met some of my countrymen, on the road, and they convinced me to join them. I thought I could make some money. But I only worked a few days. The owners of the land say I look too young and it is a big risk for them if there are checks.”

At night, lines of men queue outside the camp shower, a makeshift structure hung with plastic sheeting. There are no toilets and no hot water. Youngsters like Yoro who can’t find work sell tin cans of lukewarm water they have collected from the two working taps near the camp to sell to workers returning from the fields. Others sit on the ground wrapping cuts on their hands and arms with toilet paper and sticky tape.

Nearby, a group of Tunisian men sell halal meat. At another makeshift stall, north Africans barter over second-hand boots, mobile phone chargers, toilet paper and rice.

Salvatore Vella, a prosecutor in Agrigento, has been working on an investigation into the Sicilian gang masters profiting from migrant labour exploitation.

His investigation was triggered by an alleged attack on a 27-year-old Nigerian who was working in the fields of Favara, near Agrigento. After working two extra hours in the field, the worker asked the owner of the company, a 28-year-old Italian, for an extra fee of five euros. In response, the Italian man allegedly pulled out a gun and fired several shots, seriously injuring him.

“All the inhumanity of this phenomenon has come out in this investigation,” Vella says. “The exploited immigrants in the countryside are treated as dead meat. They are considered objects, the property of businessmen, slaves.”

Yvan Sagnet, a 31-year-old Cameroonian and former informal agricultural worker, led migrant protests against exploitation in the Sicilian fields in 2011. He is now a union leader for CGIL, one of Italy’s biggest labour unions.

For him, the tent and leaking shelters signify a failure to implement hard-won laws intended to protect migrants from labour abuses.

“Existing laws need to be applied, such as the requirement for farmers to give a contract to seasonal workers in Italy that includes food and a place to stay, but this never happens,” he says. “That’s why, increasingly, migrant workers are forced to live in these ‘ghetto-camps’.”

He says one solution is to turn these spaces into official immigration camps, overseen and managed by the government.

“We can’t just get rid of the tents and send these workers home. It won’t work,” he says. “We need an institutional organisation to negotiate the contracts between the farmers and the migrants.”

Meanwhile, night has fallen over the camp. Fires are lit. In a few hours, the long queues will begin to form again as the migrants wait for the vans to arrive.

Amadou will try again. He needs to work but he knows his chances are slim. “They consider me too old to work,” he says, smiling, “but, the truth is, it’s this camp that is making me old. These days trapped in a tent. These days that seem like years.”