Caporalato Capitalism: Labour Brokerage and Agrarian Change in a Mediterranean Society

This article discusses the persistence of illegal labour mediation in Italian industrialized agricultural production despite a decade of legal and policy reforms. Focusing on the regions of Puglia and Basilicata during the so-called Mediterranean ‘refugee crisis’ (2011-2018), it analyses such mediation as a central infrastructure of contemporary capitalist agri-food supply chains, which both capitalizes on the value of labour reproduction, and contributes to adversely incorporating migrant workers into local agricultural labour markets in a context of increasingly globalized retail agriculture.