I say to you, to you who with your tongues unsheathed like swords defend the furrow of food sovereignty, you who gorge yourself on Italian excellences picked fresh as nature creates from the sacred fields of the homeland, you who with greedy media craving bite into a form of parmesan Po Valley, thus embracing Italian values, and you, noble fanfares of earth, cow and sea jewels adequately displayed in the tabernacles of food boutiques at Christian Dior prices.
I am saying to you brokers, intermediaries and wholesalers, and above all to you purchasing offices who are holding your auctions at the maximum discount and choking the farmers, I am saying to you big farmers who are choking the labourers, and to you big farmers who are protecting your immunities by placing the tanks for agricultural use under siege to the national and transnational institutions responsible for surrendering to your conditions with firm determination.
And finally here I am, plenipotentiary ministers of the right of life and death over humans who willingly let them die at sea and equally willingly let them live as long as they are in total, infamous subjugation of clandestinity.
Here, I propose today’s lunch menu for all of you, and in a single course you will find the exhaustive compendium of all the sovereign excellence of Italy. It is a dish that the extraordinary Italian culinary creativity will allow you to prepare in a hundred different recipes; the raw material then lends itself to perfection, it is a beautiful arm of a young human animal, its owner is not in a position to claim it, therefore it is freely available, very recently slaughtered, it is well preserved somewhere, it is just a matter of leaving it to take. And so today you will finish consuming Satnam Singh, the human you have fed on piece by piece, without leaving anything uneaten because, like the pig, nothing of a young animal like him is thrown away.
How many Satnam Singhs have you, are you feeding yourself piece by piece, how many Satnam Singhs have you got rid of inedible remains along the ditches, the dumps, the hovels? Oh, yes, all of you, the graceful, the proud supply chain company of this country’s industrial agricultural system, the System. Because this is the truth, that it is not a question of dealing with a congregation of criminals and a handful of inhuman filthy people, for them it will even be possible to have a trial and a conviction, but of placing the System in the face of its responsibilities.
And the System is like this. That slave labor, illegal work, and evasion, of course, evasion, which is an appreciable result, are a structural, necessary, essential fact for the prosperity, and even survival, of the agri-food chain as a source of profit. If there is an alternative, it is from another system, a system from another world, the one that, even if it exists, no one sees right now.
Naturally the System is not all-encompassing, it provides around ninety percent of what we eat. The virtuous people, the farmers and the agricultural cooperatives who organize themselves in parallel and alternative markets, who produce and distribute on their own, who supply high quality products, and who inevitably do so for the rich foreign market, are extraneous to the System. or for the network of boutiques that serves that 2.3 percent of those blessed by fate who add to their many privileges also that of being nourished by the best delicacies. Just to clarify, to my neighbor Silvano who grows Decana pears and treats his workers with great dignity and affection, last year the merchant to whom he sells in the field and who in turn distributes directly in the markets of Piedmont, gave him paid the Decana 1.70 euros, a figure of great satisfaction for Paride, but who will bring that fruit to the counter for five, six euros, and only because the merchant is a type of person who does not make excessive demands for profit.
No, the System is different, the System feeds the people, and the people don’t go to boutiques, they go to supermarkets, the System is governed by large-scale retail trade. And large retailers must do two things, they must fear low prices and also earn as much as possible from them. And with large-scale distribution the entire chain that starts from the field must gain, the wholesalers, the intermediaries, the stockers, this is how tenders are run at the lowest price, and whoever is at the top strangles whoever is below them, down to the farmer, which naturally is not the small but the large farmer, the large agricultural enterprise, and to have its profit it needs labor at very low prices, it needs working animals, illegal migrants are in the world for this, the ring lowest in the chain.
There would be inspectors with the task of supervising and sanctioning precisely for their protection, but, as we know, they are too few, for some reason it is not possible to put an adequate number of them to work; but even if there were enough of them, I’m not so sure that Satnam Singh would have a better life. If the System wants to remain as it is, to survive on food production marked by economic marginality, it is essential that Satnam Singh remains what he is .
Is there any way for things to change? No, in this world I sincerely believe not. For them to change for the better at least a little it would be enough to shorten the chain, but, excluding the last one, each link is a power, a power that also exerts its political strength, votes and gets people to vote, cajoles and pays, is influential and untouchable.
Could it be at least a little better? Perhaps the main reason for the economic marginality of the agri-food sector, for the small profit, is due to the perishability of the goods, after a couple of days that a peach is on the counter it is already there, disgusting to look at even if perhaps it is even better to eat eat. We could then organize a low-cost marketing system for pre-expired products, so to speak, those that are perfectly edible but which should be thrown away a day or two later. It would benefit millions of families on the edge of food poverty, but evidently it is a solution that is too difficult to think and organize, or, perhaps, it would cost large retailers more to think and organize than to throw away.
And so I say to you, all of you mentioned above, continue calmly to consume your meal of sovereign excellence; we here, good people, who can tell you if in the end we happen to throw down some pieces of it, just out of carelessness of course, just because that’s how the world works and it’s not like you can pay attention to everything without being able to close a watch out even for just a moment.
