South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
Program helps asylum-seekers in Italy gain legal employment
CASALE DEL BOSCO, Italy — Summer is arriving in Italy’s wine country in Tuscany, and the leaves on the vines shimmer in gold and green.
Yahya Adams moves his gloves through the foliage, removing excess buds and shoots to make the vines stronger. He’s among 24 asylum-seekers from Africa and Asia who are working in vineyards of Tenute Silvio Nardi on this year’s crop of Brunello di Montalcino, one of Italy’s most famous wines.
They come from Ghana, Togo, Sierra Leone, Guinea Bissau, Pakistan and other countries, with no prior experience in winemaking. But they have found temporary work here through a local nonprofit group that helps asylum-seekers find legal employment in vineyards or olive groves while their claims are being processed.
Adams, a 21-year-old from Ghana, is enjoying learning the craft.
“I like to study how the plant grows and I want to improve in this job,” he said. “And one day, I could teach others who arrive how to do the work, how to manage the plants, everything.”
Adams left Ghana when he was 14 to search for work abroad. He spent two years in Libya, a conflict-ridden North African country where many migrants hoping to reach Europe face abuse and extortion from human smugglers.
Adams said he was temporarily held in captivity in Libya before making it to Italy on a ship with 118 other migrants. After living in centers for unaccompanied minors, he returned to Italy, where he is enrolled in the agricultural work program of the Cooperativa Agricola San Francesco.
The NGO aims to bring asylum-seekers into the labor market with the same pay and working conditions as Italians, keeping them away from the off-thebooks system known as “caporalato” in which migrant workers often get exploited. The phenomenon is widespread among seasonal workers in the agricultural sector, where almost 40% are hired irregularly, according to the Placido Rizzotto Observatory, a union watchdog group monitoring the infiltration of organized crime in agriculture.
“Some of them, they can tell you, for three or four years they worked in the black market, with no contract, nothing, so they did not exist. They didn’t have social security, nothing. Here they have a contract, there is hope,” said Salis Godje, who coordinates the program for Cooperativa Agricola San Francesco.
Godje, who came from Togo as a student and received a degree in economics, said asylum-seekers selected for the program are given a training course to learn the basics of vineyard work. After that they do three seasonal stints in the vineyard.
The program is in its second year at Tenute Silvio Nardi, a family-owned winemaker. It annually produces 210,000 bottles of wine, including 160,000 bottles of Brunello di Montalcino, which is aged for five years before release.