Caporalato capitalism. Labour brokerage and agrarian change in a Mediterranean society

This article analyses a contemporary form of illegal labour mediation, known in Italian as caporalato, which persists in industrialized agricultural production in southern Italy despite a decade of unrelenting legal and policy reforms. Focusing on the regions of Puglia and Basilicata during the so-called Mediterranean ‘refugee crisis’ (2011-2018), this article addresses the question of how practices of caporalato remain a central infrastructure of globalized agri-food production, while segregating migrant workers in rural society. Adopting an infrastructural lens, we propose two main arguments. First, we highlight the need to shift analytical concerns from ‘criminal’ labour gangmasters and their protection business to a broader analysis of their role in the reproduction of precarious migrant labour. Second, we highlight how caporalato infrastructures contribute to adversely incorporating migrant ‘seasonal’ workers into local agricultural labour markets in a context of increasingly globalized retail agriculture and changing state policies.