Italy has been shocked by multiple reports of the “brutal” treatment of migrants working on farms across the country, including the recent death of a worker on a flower farm in temperatures of 40C.

Tens of thousands of migrants have been taking to fields to pick tomatoes and other outdoor-grown crops across Italy at the same time as the country has been engulfed in consecutive heatwaves since the middle of June.

The Italian Meteorological Society said average summer temperatures in Italy between June and August have increased by 1.5C over the last thirty years 1994-2023.

Despite the billions of Euros in revenue generated by the agricultural industry – with Italy one of the world’s biggest exporters of products such as tinned tomatoes – harvesting roles come with low wages, long working hours and a lack of employment rights.

Most of the workers from countries including Bangladesh, India and sub-Saharan Africa are also left living in ghettos and abandoned buildings, say Unions, and are controlled by gangmasters who recruit and keep part of their wages.

“When extreme heat is correlated with criminal activities in agriculture, it is clear that the tragedies we have been telling for so long are actually occurring,” said Fabio Ciconte, director of the food and farming NGO Terra!.

At least 30 people have fainted in Agro Pontino, an area of reclaimed farmland in central Italy, due to the heat since June, said Marco Omizzolo, a sociologist at La Sapienza University of Rome.

Instead of calling ambulances and making medical reports, the employer or gangmaster will place the worker in the shade or give him cold water or coffee before allowing them to continue work.

“Employers and gangmasters hide everything in order to avoid legal problems,” said Omizzolo.

More than 47,000 people are estimated to have died in Europe as a result of last year’s high

temperatures, with more than 12,000 of those in Italy, the highest total across the continent.

But it is unknown how many workers have been injured or died due to extreme heat in Italy. The Italian health and safety body has said in the past that accidents at work attributable to the heat are almost never classified as such, rather as fainting, falls or something similar.

A case in point is Famakan Dembele, 28, a tomato picker in the southern Italian province of Foggia, who died on August 7 last year, but for who the Guardian has been unable to confirm a cause of death.

Here is an excerpt from the article published on The Guardian on Tue 27 Aug 2024 with the bylines Stefania Prandi in Foggia, Deepa Parent, and Tom Levitt