This is the story of the tent city founded in February 2012 and the adjacent slums erected last November due to a massive arrival of migrants. Last January, the migrants living in the camp were about 1300; the tent city was planned to host 280 people. Despite the riots back in 2012, little or nothing has changed in Rosarno. Every year, during the citrus season, thousands of African migrants make their way to the Gioia Tauro plain looking for a job more and more difficult to find and in much worse condition because of the serious crisis affecting the sector. With a salary of only 25 euros per day, working off the books and without any kind of protection, hundreds of African migrants survive in inhuman conditions by moving from one refugee camp to another, completely abandoned to themselves. The lack of a government plan and the insufficient provisional measures currently in place restrain the local authorities to solve, or at least contain, this huge problem becoming year after year more serious and unmanageable. A least 60% of the oranges production lies on the ground. With the crisis gripping the sector, oranges are worth 5-7 cents a Kg and for the small producer is more convenient to let the fruit rot on the ground rather than collect it. At the end of the harvest season, all the slums will be dismantled leaving behind the great uncertainty for the coming year, heavily weighting on the economic and social structure of the whole plain.

 

"...Consider if this is a man/ who works in the mud, / who does not know peace, / who fights for a scrap of bread, / who dies because of a yes or a no..." 

(If This is a Man, P. Levi)