On June 1, 2026, four agricultural workers — Waseem Khan, Amin Fazal Khogjani, Ullah Ismat Qiemi, and Safi Iayjad — were locked inside a minivan at a petrol station in Amendolara, Calabria, Italy, and burned alive. Investigators believe the crime is likely linked to “caporalato”, a form of labour exploitation embedded in corporate food systems. The four men had been picking strawberries for weeks without pay. Their only “crime” was asking for the wages they were owed. Our hearts go out to their families, friends, and all those who loved them.
Almost exactly one year ago, at the First Mediterranean Congress of Agroecology in Agrigento, we affirmed together that a Mediterranean agroecology movement cannot be credible if it does not center justice, decolonisation, and political responsibility.
We refuse to call this a tragedy. Tragedies are accidents. This was the logical outcome of a system built on the disposability of certain lives.
The land and those who work it
Agroecology begins with the land and those who care for it. It insists that the health of soils, ecosystems, and communities cannot be separated. And yet, the fields of agricultural frontiers across Europe are sustained by a labour force rendered legally precarious, socially invisible, and physically vulnerable. The same logic that extracts nutrients from the soil without returning them extracts labour from human beings without recognising them.
Caporalato is what happens when food is treated as a commodity to be produced at the lowest possible cost, and when workers have no legal protection, no stable status, and no way out. It is what happens when borders are weaponised to create a permanently exploitable workforce.
Europe's money, Europe's responsibility
What happened in Calabria is a failure of European agricultural policy. A major cross-border investigation published by DeSmog in September 2025 revealed that 30 farms and farm owners received at least €14 million in EU subsidies over the past ten years, despite convictions or formal investigations for labour abuse. In one documented case, a farmworker described shifts of up to 14 hours, physical and verbal violence, constant surveillance, and cramped, unsanitary living conditions, while his employer received over €270,000 in public funds during the same period, and was later charged with human trafficking.
As Agroecology Europe, we participate in high-level policy spaces. We want to use that access to name what is happening: EU subsidies are bankrolling the exploitation of workers in Europe’s fields. The CAP and the EU agri-food market, in their current form and unequal structure, continue to provide the enabling conditions that made the deaths in Calabria possible.
The EU's answer: more walls, more deportations
While the bodies were still unidentified, the European Union was finalising its new Return Regulation, a sweeping overhaul of migration enforcement that expands detention, including for children, enables home raids, creates offshore deportation hubs in third countries, and introduces entry bans stretching to ten years or more. Rights organisations have rightly called it the “ICE-ification” of European migration policy. This is not separate from our struggle as an agroecological movement, as it is the same political economy that keeps food cheap and demands that the people who produce and harvest it remain cheap too, without rights or recourse.
What agroecology demands
The EU agenda is pushing our agri-food system even further towards an unfair notion of “competitiveness”, regardless of its real social, economic, and environmental consequences. A competitive agri-food system should never lead to the deaths and exploitation of agricultural workers.
The Nyéléni Declaration is clear: agroecology is a form of resistance to an economic system that puts profit before life. That resistance is meaningless if it stops at the farm gate and does not extend to workers in the field, to people crossing the sea, or to the communities whose lands and livelihoods are plundered to sustain the model we are trying to dismantle.
Food sovereignty and “competitiveness” cannot coexist with slavery in the fields. Agroecology cannot be a practice of liberation if it ignores who picks the fruit.
We need major shifts from Brussels in the skewed concentration of farm subsidies. Policies should ensure that all food value chains incorporate and reflect the true costs of our food. Rural communities and infrastructure need substantial support. Otherwise, they will continue to serve as the stage for a “competitive”, yet exploitative, EU agri-food system.