Invisibili, ma indispensabili l'emersione tra i braccianti nel Sud Italia

Abstract

The pandemic spread of Covid-19 has helped to show some of the fragilities and contradictions of the social organisation of neo-liberal capitalism, both globally and locally. The most obvious example has obviously been in the health sector: the lack of beds in intensive care units as well as the shortage of health personnel are not contingent errors of management planning but the consequences of a strategic choice of more than a decade of subordination of health policies to corporatist and econometric logics. Here we will focus instead on the contradictions that have emerged in the organisation of the agro-food supply chains, and in particular on the issue of the intensive exploitation not only of natural resources - identified by some studies as a concomitant cause of the spread of Covid-19 - but also of the migrant labour force, i.e. of the last link in the production chain, those who harvest the fruits of the earth that then reach consumers.