by Riccardo Marinelli.
In memory of Carlo Petrini (founder of Slowfood), and of the four farm workers who died in the countryside of Cosenza
When I reach out at the supermarket to pick up a punnet of strawberries, my first thought is always about taste. Knowing they are for my son, I do not want to disappoint his expectations. I look for the right color, the shine, the variety I think might be sweeter. And in those few seconds, appearance and packaging become the promise of a good fruit.
And yet, within those 4 or 5 euros of value, Carlo Petrini taught me to look for another kind of value as well. To ask myself how that food reaches us. Who picks it? Under what conditions? With what dignity?
We are used to thinking of food above all as a product, starting from size, yield, aesthetics, price, availability and, in the best-case scenario, a desirable good taste and sugar level. Slow Food taught us instead that food is much more than that: it is above all a relationship between people and territories; it therefore concerns landscapes, work, culture, dignity and social justice. In the movement’s slogan, "Good, clean and fair for all", there is a vision and a different way of looking at agriculture and at the real value of food.
For this reason, the death of the four Pakistani workers in the countryside of Cosenza cannot be filed away as a tragic news item. It is a question that enters directly into our supermarkets, our warehouses, our purchasing negotiations and our everyday gestures.
A consumer like me, far from the production areas, is used to dealing with taste and price, which, as we know very well, keeps increasing year after year. In the best-case scenario, if they have environmental awareness, they will assess products with a lower impact. But rarely does one ask what the social impact of those strawberries is in the production area. How real is the risk that the supply chain in front of them is still, in some way, generating conditions of exploitation for those who work in it?
Faced with these facts, I therefore address the question directly to the readers of Italian Berry. In your daily work, do you deal with underpaid workers, exhausting shifts, inhumane transport, social invisibility? Have you ever come across a gangmaster? And if so, do you consider it an anomaly in the system or the symptom of something structural, the product of a supply chain that tends to compress prices more and more without questioning the human consequences? How is technological development managed in relation to work and employment for people in the local area? And what would happen, in concrete terms, if the price we pay for strawberries truly included, within the cost, a minimum value for the remuneration of labor?
Looking for the answer in the data leads to the report on agri-food crimes in Italy, produced by Eurispes, Coldiretti and the Fondazione Osservatorio Agromafie and presented in May 2025, which paints a picture that should make every operator in the supply chain reflect. The business of agromafias is estimated at around 25.2 billion euros, a figure that has grown strongly in recent years.
The report also describes the emergence of transnational organizations that arrange the arrival of workers from the Indian subcontinent in exchange for large sums of money, only to force them to work in exploitative conditions in order to repay the debt they have incurred. Those four Pakistani workers who died in Cosenza are not necessarily an isolated case: they are therefore part of an underground system that deserves attention.
And this is not only a southern Italian phenomenon. In Northern Italy, gangmastering takes on more complex forms, with cooperatives requiring farm workers to formally join without guaranteeing any real benefit, and with wages often significantly lower than those set out in national collective agreements.
200,000 irregular agricultural workers in Italy
€6,000 average gross annual wage of a farm worker
59% of inspected farms present irregularities
€25.2 billion the business of agromafias, doubled in a decade
Sources: VII Report on Agromafias and Gangmastering, FLAI-CGIL Osservatorio Placido Rizzotto (Dec. 2024) · 8th Report on Agri-Food Crimes, Eurispes-Coldiretti-Fondazione Osservatorio Agromafie (May 2025)
Not the entire supply chain is like this, of course, and it is right to say so. There are producers who pay regular contracts, buyers who have adopted social audits, certifications that attempt to make visible what normally remains invisible. Yet there is a part of the system that is paying the price difference we do not pay for that punnet of strawberries, and it has no name in the newspapers until someone dies in a field in Cosenza.
Recognizing the problem does not mean blaming those who buy or those who sell. It means stopping treating price as the only variable that matters.
Carlo Petrini taught us that quality and justice are not in contradiction, and that the taste of a fruit and the dignity of those who pick it can move in the same direction.
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