The foreman pushes you.
He sees tomatoes on the ground and screams,
"Pick them up!"
If there are any left over he gets angry, he pushes and slaps you.
He hurts you, he doesn't respect you. That is slavery.
Slavery, not just exploitation.
Exploitation is unfair wages, but if they push you,
if you work in the full sun, if you can't speak out,
you don't have papers and you sleep in ghettos - that's slavery.
Modern day slavery does not require chains.
What is happening here is slavery.
Slavery in Italy
A report by Katrin Sandmann and Fritz Schapp
Yvan Sagnet refers to the over 400,000 african and eastern-workers
that work in the Italian agriculture industry as slaves.
This man from Cameroon used to be one of them.
Today, I fight for their rights against mafia-like unfair competition,
abuse of power and exploitation
Sañe wants to send the exploiters to prison and put an end
to the inhumane living condiitons of these workers.
These are typical living conditions for the immigrants.
They use the fireplace for everything as there's no power, light or running water.
Nothing at all.
But they improvise; they use the fireplace to heat and cook.
This is used as a table. There's not even any oil.
And these are the plates they eat off.
Look, there are eight mattresses.
40 people may sleep here.
See them?
They put 40 people in this room.
Plaster may fall on them as they sleep
and it's too cold.
There's no glass in the windows. They're covered with a metal sheet.
The immigrants have to buy
almost everything they need to survive
from intermediaries called foremen.
Sometimes they come from the same countries as the workers.
For a rotten mattress, they ask for 10 euros.
Italians live in that yellow house. No foreigners, Italians.
But they get on with the foremen.
It's the only house in the area with running water and power.
The ones who live here have to go there to charge their phones, for example.
Because there's nothing here.
And they charge 50 cents for each charge and €1 or €1.50 to have a wash.
It makes me cry. I am so disgusted when I see that there are
people who have to live in these conditions in 21st century Italy.
It's horrible, it's dreadful, and everyone knows it.
Everyone knows it but they don't care because it's about immigrants.
They treat immigrants like animals.
They only want them to work so
the farmers' and politicians' businesses make money.
They aren't considered human.
This is Italy, welcome to Italy.
The immigrants that live here are totally controlled by the foremen
who are organised like a kind of mafia.
When the farmers need labour for the fields,
they call the intermediaries who abuse their power
to exploit and control the migrants.
And they can do it because they live alongside them in the ghettos.
The regions of Apulia and Basilicata in the south of Italy
are the country's biggest vegetable producers.
30% of Italian tomatoes are harvested in Apulia alone.
The large ghettos are often found in the isolated areas
which surround the fields.
Cities of misery grow there.
If we go in, we'll have to use a hidden camera. Put the big camera down.
The foremen don't like camaras.
They'd show their illegal business.
And the immigrants are ashamed to be seen living in the ghettos.
They are ashamed to be recorded.
They'd be ashamed if peopleback home could see them like this.
Because every time they speak to friends and family, they tell a completely
different story, where they are lawyers or work in an office.
They lie simply because they're ashamed to admit
what their life is really like.
During the harvest, more than 3,000 people live here.
Most of them are from Africa.
They are people who arrived on the coasts of Italy decades ago,
the immigrants who Europe has been abandoning to Italy for years.
Some have papers. Others are illegal.
The Italian government looks the other way because without cheap labour,
the harvests would go to waste.
There's rubbish everywhere, it attracts flies and mosquitos.
In these ghettos, there's neither rubbish collection nor laws.
This land, where the strongest rule, is dangerous for Yvan.
He suspects this is where the death threats are coming from.
The foremen who live here know that he's their most determined enemy.
Yvan has spent years gathering proof of their illegal behaviour in these fields.
He's looking for witnesses and identifying criminals.
That's why he knows many of the inhabitants and their stories,
like the one of this man from Sudan.
He fled to Italy 20 years ago.
His European dream ended in a hut where he sells second hand clothes.
His customers are refugees from all around the world.
Suddenly a man approaches Yvan. He's a foreman.
He exaggerates his nervousness, but he urges us to leave.
We want to put an end to these ghettos once and for all.
We demand structures, water, light kitchens, decent bedrooms,
and my dream is to achieve all this with NOCAP.
Roma. Yvan Sagnet lives and works in the city centre, near the Vatican.
Here in his apartment, he founded NOCAP,
a certification system for ethically-produced food.
NOCAP is based on article 4 of the universal declaration of human rights,
which says "No one shall be held in slavery or servitude;
slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms."
NOCAP is an organisation that says "no" to the foreman system,
and opposes it with a labelling system.
We put these labels on products from all the farmers who don't exploit
their workers, after checking that they respect the workers' rights.
We have started a collaboration with an association of small farmers
called "Altra-Agricultura".
There are sixty thousand producers.
That's how we've started with a small and solid base.
Yvan's commitment to human rights and his bravery when it comes to calling out
and reporting the mafioso structures in agriculture
is valued by the Italian president,
Sergio Matarella, who awarded him a a knighthood in 2017.
It was a great moment in my life.
It was an amazing moment, because I received recognition from a country
of which I don't have citizenship.
I'm not Italian, I'm still Camaroonian at the moment.
And receiving an award from Italy made me so happy.
[Singing in Italian]
In 2017, Yvan is a father. It's a year full of happiness.
But it is overshadowed by death threats.
His enemies know that Yvan is ready to take them to the supreme court.
Verónica, his wife, fears the consequences.
[Singing in Italian]
Unfortunately, the death threats indicate how well he's doing his job,
how much he's obstructing the interests of the powerful.
And naturally, as his family, that worries us.
Especially when he goes to the places those death threats come from.
We pray that he can achieve what he wants without coming to harm.
Yvan has proved that he's very brave and tenacious,
and he's shown us that it's possible to change things, little by little,
by working hard and making sacrifices.
And he has my support in that battle he fights every day.
In 2017, Yvan arrived in Italy, the country he'd admired since childhood,
not to fight, but to study.
It was all going well until he failed an exam
and lost his grant at Turin University.
His desperate search for work led him to Nardó, in the south,
to the tomato harvest.
Yvan Sagnet arrived at this station on 10 July 2011,
and something happened that changed his life forever.
Today, this 33 year-old is returning to the outskirts of the place
where, at the time, there were thousands of African workers in dome tents,
under plastic covers or outdoors.
This was incredibly dirty and it was very hot,
and I asked God, "What is this? Where have I ended up?"
I'd been living in a normal environment in Turin,
where I was living in normal house, a student residence
with a bath, my own room, a bed.
And suddenly I found myself in a place sleeping on a mattress outdoors.
While exploring the terrain, Yvan discovers that
there are harvest workers here again.
There aren't many, but their conditions are no better than back then.
Three days after he arrived, he met a foreman called Meki.
He was from Sudan. A big strong guy.
Yvan spent four days in the fields under Meki's brutal control.
He was paid one euro for every 100 kilos of tomatoes picked.
He earnt a total of 14 kilos on day one.
From that, he had to pay 10 to Meki for transport, food and water.
After a 14-hour day under the hot sun and being beaten,
he was left with four euros.
That's it. And it would be even worse if you got ill.
I remember a co-worker who fainted suddenly because of the sun.
It was too hot. He fell to the floor.
Damn, it was really hard.
I was next to him when he fell and I asked him what happened, what should I do.
I went to find water and poured it on him.
I told the foreman he needed to go to hospital.
But there wasn't one nearby.
The nearest hospital was a long way away.
And the foreman answered: "Leave him. If you want him to go to hospital,
I'll charge you 50 euros for the transport."
That isn't even exploitation. It's slavery.
The man barely survived the collapse in the field.
I worked for five days and on the fifth, we said "Enough. We're exhausted.
We want a contract. We want our rights to be recognised.
We're fed up of being treated like slaves."
Yvan called for a strike, the first among the workers.
The men from the ghetto follow him.
The local TV channel, Telerama, reported on the event.
The death threats made Yvan flee, but his indignation made him return.
When three months later, the harvest was in danger of rotting,
the farmers gave up and offered more money and work contracts.
The govenment of Rome passed a law against the brutal foreman system.
Shortly afterwards, Yvan brough the first case against owners and supervisors.
Yvan has dedicated his life to the fight for human rights,
and today he's fighting on several fronts: In industrial zones,
in the fields, in the courts, and increasingly at the negotiation tables.
Here in Basilicata, he's meeting with some farmers.
And he needs speakers from among the
workers' direct employers.
The meeting was organised by Yvan's main ally,
the trade unionist Gianni Fabris.
The production of fruit and vegetables in Italy is on the verge of disaster.
Our products are subjected to "price dumping".
The sellers tell the farmers "I will pay the same
for your peaches as I pay for those from Morocco or Turkey.
They are cheaper than yours. If you want to sell them, that's the price."
This is the reality in the Italian countryside.
The food industry corporations keep the system as it is.
They lower the prices to the minimum, leaving no margin for the farmers to pay
the workers, meaning the system dictates they have to exploit their workers.
Yvan is trying to find a solution with farmers and trade unions.
We need to raise awareness and ask consumers
to take more social responsibility.
The consumer needs to be aware that for every kilo of tomatoes they buy,
there is a job.
A job that exploits workers, or one that
is ethically sound.
If they don't rethink it, we're dead.
A few days later, Yvan gets a message that cheers him up.
An Italian supermarket chain offered him a first deal.
They committed to buying NOCAP products,
for a value of up to a million euros for the first consigment.
A great incentive for all those who want to work with Yvan.
Yvan shows us how the NOCAP system works in Graziano.
Here, the farmer picks up the workers himself and doesn't leave transport
in the hands of the intermediaries.
The vans establish the power of the foreman.
They take the workers to the fields.
There is no public transport.
This means the foremen are in charge of transporting them and abuse the situation.
The foremen put up to 30 people in one vehicle with a maximum
of 8 passengers permitted.
I can assure you that a journey in those overloaded vans is horrible.
Most of them have no window because the foremen don't want the police to see
how many people they're carrying.
There's almost no air, and there are deaths every year.
In August 2008, two totally packed vans
crashed in a few days.
16 African workers died.
I will do it differently. These lads are workers who've come here
in a normal vehicle.
They haven't had to pay for transport.
As you can see, their clothes are white. They're working clothes.
They also wear protective masks and gloves.
We take care of occupational safety.
Before starting work here, everyone signs a work contract.
And the salary complies with the law.
In this field, they're going to pick the last tomatoes of the season.
One of the workers, Tómas, from Ghana, agrees to talk for a moment.
We don't usually have a contract, because in Europe and Italy, you need
permits and contracts to find a decent job.
That means that often we don't leave the ghettos.
You believe we're bad people or that we're not human beings.
Bur we are people, with a different skin colour.
We have blood in our veins. We're all one. We're all human.
The man in whose fields Tómas and the others are working thinks the same.
Giuseppe Viniola's family have been growing organic vegetables for 30 years.
Viniola signs a contract with the workers. Like an increasing amount of farmers,
he's trying to leave behind the system which, due to extreme price pressure,
makes him an exploiter.
I think the foreman system is the worst possible error,
because it means you employ a workforce which you are ultimately exploiting.
The tomato harvest is very hard so
it's essential to recognise the value of their work.
That's why it's important to sign contracts and protect the workers.
For the tomato harvest, we pay €5 net per hour plus bonuses.
That's double the amount paid by foreman systems.
We must change the system from the roots up for the tomato harvest.
There are great difficulties and it's extremely hard to fight
against those prices.
An Italian trade unionist worked out what needs to happen to solve this.
If the large commercial chains were to pay the farmers,
just two cents more per kilo of tomatoes, they would have 235 million euros
of additional turnover.
This would allow them to provide the workers with dignified
accomodation and working conditions.
And the problem with the foremen would be resolved.
The end of October. Lecce, in the south of Italy.
Yvan's battle against the leaders and producers began five years ago.
This is where he had his biggest success. A conviction in the first instance.
But now the court could also be the setting for his worst defeat.
The appeal process begins today.
At the first hearing, nine foremen were sentenced to 11 years in prison.
They were declared guilty of slavery; nine foremen and
three Italian farmers were sentenced.
To begin with, about 50 of us testified against those who exploited us
to the police.
We reported them all by name.
Today, there are only eight left who are brave enough to testify.
I am the main witness.
Their enemies, sitting on the accused bench,
defend themselves with every means possible.
The farmers have a team of expensive lawyers.
Yvan isn't happy.
"They all exploit workers.
I am one of their victims and I stand by my statement.
If the conviction were confirmed at the end of the appeal,
it would be an extraordinary success for Yvan Sagnet,
although for now, it would only be symbolic.
This process hasn't changed the working conditions
of the workers in the fields.
Of course, the foreman system still rules all over Italy.
And the bad living conditions of the people in the ghettos are the same,
they still have no water or light.
I was always aware that this process wouldn't be enough to change everything.
However, Yvan Sagnet believes that the process is a milestone.
It's worth fighting. We live in a world where you have to fight for your rights,
because if you don't fight, nothing will ever change.
Change will only be achieved by fighting, and we're ready.
April 2019: The first sentence was overturned,
The accused were acquitted, Yvan Sagnet will appeal against this.