The city of Rosarno will have its name associated with the systematic violence waged against rural workers, which season after season look to earn a living in Italy.

In early January 2010, two of the hundreds of workers who were living in the city in precarious conditions, were brutally attacked.

The initial attack led to a mobilization on the streets of the city that was considered by the mafia organization of Calabria “Ndrangheta” as a challenge of their control over the place. 53 people were injured in the clashes, 21 of which are immigrants, four of them were shot with fire guns. The local authorities of Rosarno decided to demolish the abandoned factory where many of the foreigners were sleeping and send them to the neighboring cities in small groups.

In response to the incident – which led to a mobilization in Rome demanding security for the workers- the substitute attorney of the National Antimafia Attorney’s Office, Alberto Cisterna, toled Avvenire newspaper that the ones who fired at the immigrants are probably men from the Ndrangheta group “to show they control the territory”:

The violence against “undocumented” immigrants – as Silvio Berlusconi’s government calls them – seems to be backed by the official discourse and by the community policies included in the so called Common Agrarian Policy (PAC).

“There is an 18% unemployment rate in the south of Italy. Work has to go to the Italians who want to do it, not to clandestine immigrants”, said Berlusconi’s minister Roberto Calderoli. This statement can be interpreted as a boost to the racist violence.

Two weeks after the incidents, the European Coordinator of La Via Campesina met in the city of Torino where it exposed how the PAC has favored the concentration and industrialization of agriculture work to the detriment of peasants.

“The Rosarno incidents are part of a immigration policy that fails to respect human rights, a practice that is present all around Europe and caused by the globalization of economic exchanges that goes against people and a fair distribution of the common goods”, says a press release of the organization.

Member of La Via Campesina, Fabricio Garbarino told Real World Radio that the European parliament cannot remain oblivious to these incidents that are happening in the continent.

The foreign rural workers’ strike in Italy is promoted by the group “March 1st, 2010 – Foreigners’ Strike”, which has chosen that day as a result of an initiative by French immigrants. It has a Facebook profile with more than 11,000 supporters, many of them Italian.

The European Coordinator of La Via Campesina backs the measure while it recalls that PAC is considering the creation of a rural labor rights watch group and demands its implementation.

In Europe, it is estimated that there are nearly 10 million people working in agriculture production and in Italy the figure is 1.3 million, according to Garbarino. For each legal worker, there are another three not regularized”.

The first source of immigrants working in the fields of the Western European countries come from inside the EU: Poland, Hungary, Romania and Ukraine. But there are also workers from Subsaharan Africa, Asia and Latin America working in the Spanish, Italian, French and Portuguese fields.

La Via Campesina demands the EU authorities to ban the states from “helping or subsidizing agriculture exploitation that fail to comply with the employer’s obligations”.

Garbarino says that immigrants working in the fields have widespread fears over the immigration laws, which makes it difficult for them to unionize.