(APW) Asylum-seekers Help Produce Italy's Famous Brunello Wine

[AKR]

Asylum-seekers Help Produce Italy's Famous Brunello Wine
2021-06-03 08:14:43.708 GMT


By ANDREA ROSA
Casale Del Bosco, Italy (AP) -- 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 wine-
making. But they have found temporary work here through a local
non-profit 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 just 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 ruthless human smugglers.
Adams said he was temporarily held in captivity in Libya
and considered going home to Ghana before making it to Italy on
a ship with 118 other migrants. After living in centers for
unaccompanied minors, he tried to find work in Belgium, but
returned to Italy, where he is now 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-the-books 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
co-ordinates the program for Cooperativa Agricola San Francesco.
Godje, who came to Italy from Togo as a student and
received a degree in economics, said the 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, pruning in the winter and summer and harvesting in
the fall.
Nicola Peirce, the president of the NGO, said the workers
are paid around 7 euros ($8.52) an hour and work eight hours a
day, in line with Italian union requirements for agricultural
work. Others who end up working irregularly often earn half as
much while working longer hours.
The program is now in its second year at Tenute Silvio
Nardi, a family-owned winemaker established in the 1950s in
hills of Casale del Bosco. It annually produces 210,000 bottles
of wine made with Sangiovese grapes, including 160,000 bottles
of Brunello di Montalcino, which is aged for five years before
release.
The asylum-seekers work in teams of eight over 15 hectares
(40 acres), pruning vines under the supervision of agronomist
Vittorio Stringari.
“You need to have some patience in the beginning,"
Stringari said. “Like with everyone who starts a new job, there
is a phase of apprenticeship. But given that they are very
motivated ... they very quickly fill the technical gap.”
Adams considers himself lucky to have a job that he likes
and from which he earns enough to send some money to his family
in Ghana.
“If I had this work in my country, I would not go
anywhere," he said.