Processing tomatoes in the era of the retailing revolution: mechanization and migrant labour in northern and southern Italy

Italy is the largest producer of industrial tomatoes in Europe and third in the world. In the two main areas of production, in the North and South of the country, the cultivation is developed in very different ways. In northern Italy, the harvest has been completely mechanized since the early 1990s; in the South, a large percentage of tomatoes continues to be manually harvested by foreign labourers from sub-Saharan Africa and Eastern Europe, whose living and working conditions are among the worst in Europe. The chapter analyses the historical, geographical, and sociological reasons of these differences, as well as their consequences. It is argued that the production chains of both North and South have become retailer-driven; nonetheless, the two areas have responded to retailer power in very different ways. In northern Italy, a process of “districtualization” has coordinated the interests of farmers and canneries; in southern Italy the processing plants unload the retailers’ pressures onto the farms, which, in turn, offload them onto migrant labourers. As a consequence, while in the North a corporate concentration process within both the canning sector and producing farms has risen, in the South the use of migrant workers in exploitative conditions has contributed to delaying the disappearance of small tomato growers and processors. Keywords: Retailer-driven agri-food chain; retailer-driven supply chain; manual harvesters; industrial district; cannery; Emilia-Romagna; Puglia; Basilicata; Campania