 Tomatoes in Italy, the social cost of production. Tomatoes are a staple ingredient in many homes across Europe, but the story of how they reach your plate may surprise you. This is a dark story of the invisible people who pick our tomatoes in Italy, but the story parallels many of the other fruits and vegetables we love and eat today, and many of the countries that proudly grow them. The story opens with a rather cheap and affordable tomato sauce tin sitting on a supermarket shelf. It took kilos of tomatoes to make it, countless hands to harvest and process it, and yet the final product is very cheap. In some cases costing even less than a euro. But how is that possible? The problem with cheap tomatoes. In Italy, tomatoes and tomato sauces are cheap because the retailers buy them for a very cheap price from farmers, and or the companies that process the tomatoes and package them. They're cheap because retailers have most of the negotiating power, and very often they get to decide their own buying price. Some retailers, for example, buy their products from reverse auctions. First, retailers launch an auction for a stock of products, let's say two tons of tomatoes. Then, every farmer or supplier who is interested in selling two tons of tomatoes to the retailer will try to pitch the cheapest selling price. It's basically a battle for who gets paid the least. The producer who manages to pitch the cheapest price wins. But often there are middlemen, like packages and processors who buy raw material from tomato producers and sell it to retailers. They have to pay for transportation, processing and packaging of tomatoes, but they know that the retailers will only pay a cheap price for their goods, so they also need to buy the raw material for cheap to be able to make some profit. What's left at the beginning of this chain is the tomato farmer. With the downward pressure on prices just described, you can conclude yourself that farmers don't make much money. However, they need to keep everything running. The raw materials, the land, the machinery, the labor, all to be paid for. Bringing together all of these costs, they need to ensure that they can still make a living. Oxfam has analyzed the policies of some of the major supermarket chains in Europe and in the US, finding that supermarkets retain an increasing share of the price paid by consumers, up to 50% in some cases. While the share for workers and producers is often less than 5%. So how can farmers survive? There are two ways of making tomato production so inexpensive that even cheap supermarket prices wouldn't make farmers broke. The first one is to use machines to perform labor-intensive tasks, such as harvesting. A machine is still a cost to the producer, but it works significantly faster than people. You don't need to pay salary for its work and you need just a few people to operate it. For these reasons, today much of the tomato harvest is mechanized and hand picking is now comparatively marginal. However, the need for hand pickers also depends on weather conditions. So their work tends to vary season to season. If it rains, for example, machines can't enter the fields and it's necessary to harvest by hand. Different organizations claim that hand-picking accounts for different amounts of the overall tomato harvest, but we would be safe to say that it accounts for roughly 15% of the harvest. The Tall and Invisible Workers Here's where our story gets darker. The second way of maintaining low prices and stable farm income, even when humans are at work, comes at a serious cost to farm workers. Farm laborers often have their fundamental rights neglected. Work in 12-hour shifts without the contract and without the guarantee that they will be paid a minimum wage or that they will be paid at all. But who is willing to take this job or rather to endure this form of modern slavery? As FAO reports, the agriculture sector currently ranks fourth most affected by modern slavery behind fishing, construction and manufacturing. Agriculture on its own accounts for 2 million people affected by modern slavery worldwide, among which migrants represent the most vulnerable group. Italian Caporalato, the gang masters. In Italy, the Caporalato is the illegal form of workforce recruitment that makes cheap labor possible. The Caporali are middlemen who find farm laborers and manage their relationship with farm managers. Often receiving bribes from both sides. In English, they're sometimes called team leaders or gang masters, as they are in charge of the whole recruitment process, international trafficking and logistics of the lives of the laborers. These include housing, full-fledged slums, food, transport to and from the fields and payments. The Caporali decide arbitrarily who gets to work and who doesn't, who gets paid and who doesn't, but also when and how much. This phenomenon has both industrial aspects and aspects of a global society, claims Diletta Bellotti, human rights advocate and expert in migration and human rights. These people living nothingness, poverty, as agricultural laborers lived a century ago, but they're recruited through targeted online ads, asking them, do you want to earn 30 euros a day? Come to Italy. But Caporalato was born to help solve an issue. Without them, it would be very hard for Italian farmers to find enough people to work in their fields. It is in all effects a mafia activity Bellotti did. And as other mafia activities, it was born to fill an institutional void. Many of the people who hoped to move to Italy to find a better future and to other European countries as similar forms of illegal recruitment happen also in countries such as Spain and the UK, get stuck in the slums without a way to leave them. In Italy, for example, to get a residence permit, you need to provide proof of a job contract and a rent contract. But if you're a trafficked farm laborer, you have neither. And so you remain stuck in a limbo of legal, social and moral invisibility. In the slums, laborers die of pneumonia because they refuse to go to the hospital. Women perform homemade abortions that can often lead to complications and even death. They avoid the hospital because they fear being sent back to their home countries. As a trafficked farm worker, you wouldn't be able to interact with the communities outside of your slum. You can't, because you need to be in the slums to be able to work. You're like completely on the Caporale to bring you to the fields. You can't ask him or her to come pick you up at will from your own home. And in any case, you most likely wouldn't even have the money to afford your own housing. Is it possible to have a more ethical tomato? In 2016, the Italian government introduced a law making Caporalato illegal and began an investigation on this phenomenon in 2018. A new law against reverse auctions was approved by the parliament in 2019. In the UK, the Gangmasters and Labor Abuse Authority was formed in 2005, which has been strengthened by the Modern Slavery Act introduced in 2015 to investigate forced or compulsory labor and human trafficking offenses. A European directive addressing these issues was also approved in 2019 and was supposed to be implemented by all EU countries by May 2021. These are all fundamental steps, but they're not enough in themselves to solve the situation. The introduction of these laws in both Italy and the UK hasn't led to guaranteed human rights for all farm workers. Unfortunately, the introduction of a law doesn't automatically mean that the law will be properly and consistently applied. Realistic changes for producers, retailers and consumers. So is there anything we can do to solve this situation? Some people claim that, where it's possible and convenient, the only alternative to the Caporali seems to be mechanization. But it's not uncommon for people who operate the machines to be recruited by the Caporali too. There are some solutions suggested by journalistic and institutional reports, academics, human rights advocates and laborers themselves to fight trafficked labor. Transparent packaging labels. At the moment, it's compulsory to have some basic information on labels, including ingredients, nutritional values and expiry dates. However, product chains could be made more transparent if other information had to be presented on food packaging labels. The first is origin, not only states but also region and province. This would make it easier for people to understand which products they should buy for both environmental and traceability reasons, allowing them to investigate which kind of practices are employed at the origin of the products. A register of suppliers. All of the suppliers that were involved in the making of that product. The name of the company responsible for transport. The food transport sector is among those most prone to infiltration by organized crime. Making it more transparent would push distributors and producers to employ people who are not involved in illegal business of any kind. Number of workers in the field and number of cultivated hectares. A quick cross-check between these numbers would allow authorities to find out immediately whether they should be suspicious of any undeclared work. Transparent price. A breakdown of the price into percentages clearly showing how the price is distributed to pay each entity in the chain. Distributors, processing companies, logistics and transport companies, producers and raw material. It's a lot of stuff to put on a tomato package, but we could come up with creative ways to make it accessible online. For example, using QR codes or links that allow people to view the following information on producers and distributors websites. Subsidies to fair producers. Governments could give subsidies to companies that commit not to resort to illegal forms of hiring and managing the workforce. Citizen-led initiatives. Vivere senza supermercato is an Italian initiative started by a group of friends who decided that they wanted to create an easier way for consumers to be more ethically responsible. The initiative created a map on which they pinned down all the retailers that sell local and ethical products around the country. Using or creating tools of this kind could drive a significant amount of consumers away from illegal products. Spending more if possible. Trying to help as consumers could also be less cheap. Caporalato free products rarely make it into large-scale distribution and even when they do, they are more expensive. However, if you're aware of this issue and you can afford to pay a bit more, this could be a big help to producers who are trying to do the right thing. Using our voices. These issues will be solved mainly through politics. But for politics to move, we need to show that this is a need of ours at a national and international level. Looking out for petitions and using our voices to spread awareness on this issue is going to be crucial to ensure that politicians know that there's public backing to solve this situation. I hope that if we all speak and make our friends and families aware of this issue, hold our governments accountable and do what's in our power as consumers, these articles soon won't be timely anymore. The story will hit its resolution and tomatoes will stop reminding me of blood. Thank you for listening to this episode of our Food Unfolded audio articles. Has listening to this article given you a new perspective? Let us know on social media linked in the description box. This article was written and read by me, Silvia Lazaris, originally posted on foodunfolded.com. Food Unfolded explores the stories behind the food on our plate, reconnecting us to the origins and sustainability of our food, co-funded by the EU and powered by EIT Food.