The Mafia Connection

I said yesterday that today would probably give me lots to write about. In fact, I want to say so much that I am not sure where to start. I had three appointments today – one with the Italian Refugee Council, one with the Centro Astalli of the Jesuits, and a phone interview with a representative of the Greek asylum service. All three were very successful from the point of view of Harald the PhD student, and very troubling from the point of view of Harald the human being. Let me tell you what happened.

This morning I drove back into Catania at 9am, having no trouble at all with finding the IRC’s offices. In fact they share offices with the intercultural centre of the city of Catania, and I certainly felt like the attraction of the day when I entered the building. I don’t know why, but everyone stared at me and two girls were giggling in the corner when I sat down to wait for my appointment. The interview was very useful. I will not summarise every single detail, but essentially the situation is as follows: the agriculture of Southern Italy is entirely dependent on migrant workers. Both my interview partners confirmed that agriculture in Sicily would be “dead” without the cheap labour that immigrants provide. Agriculture in turn is managed by the mafia. It is therefore in the interests of the mafia to get immigrants to come to Sicily. One way this is apparently done is vividly demonstrated by an incident that occurred two years ago at the Italian maritime border. When a migrant boat from Egypt (!!) arrived at that border, the people on it were transferred into a different boat – the latter process was organised by people linked to the mafia. One of my interview partners said that he would not be surprised if the mafia manages the smuggling operations on the other side of the Mediterranean. But this is not were business ends.

Seemingly idyllic Sicilian scenery

About 50 kilometres from Catania there is a small town called Mineo. Although the town is in the middle of nowhere and hardly worth mentioning, it had gained a reputation among the Sicilians since it housed an American army base of about 400 soldiers. The US army had built a whole village for itself, including an entire infrastructure, villas and lots of pretty houses. A couple of years ago, the Americans abandoned the base and left behind a ghost town. The owner of the land the base was built on, an extremely rich man named Pizzarotti, was now in trouble. For years the Americans had paid insane amounts of rent, and now he was left with a worthless piece of land nobody would ever be interested in renting. That’s when he had the idea of converting the place into a camp for immigrants. Mineo now houses 4,500 people. As could be expected, Pizzarotti is notorious for being a Mafiosi himself. Every year the Italian government pays him hundreds of thousands of euros in rent for his property. Most shockingly of all, the Italian government pays with money from the European refugee fund – €37 per day per person. Spend ten seconds calculating in your head and you will begin to see what dimensions we are talking about. Initially the people who lived around Mineo were very upset about the relocation of the refugee camp to their doorstep. Now, they have begun to base their livelihoods on it. Hundreds of people are either employed in the camp itself, or they live off it indirectly by selling food to the residents. Officially the place is called Residenze dei Aranci – Residence of Oranges.

After this meeting I went to the Centro Astalli. It is an amazing institution that provides help for immigrants of all kinds. Many immigrants avoid submitting their fingerprints to the Eurodac-database, because it will ruin their chances of applying for asylum in another EU member state according to the Dublin-Regulation (in most cases anyway). However, this also means not having access to many basic services such as receiving medication. In Sicily, everyone has to right to essential care at public hospitals, but medication costs money. That’s why the Centro Astalli provides all kinds of meds for free, including anti-retrovirals antibiotics. Assistance is also provided for people suffering from alcoholism, which is increasingly wide-spread because people are sleeping outdoors in the cold. Although the centre is run by Jesuits and there were crosses on the walls, I also saw posters with the Islamic prayer times on the walls.

One of the most shocking things the lady who showed me around told me also concerns Mineo. Some criminals have made it a business to drive the residents to Catania and back, expecting money in return. Money is obviously something immigrants lack, which is why the drivers often ask for alternative means of payment. There have been numerous incidents involving prostitution. Furthermore, the drivers will ask the Mineo residents to smuggle drugs back into the camp. This is another way that immigration has benefitted the Sicilian mafia.

After I left, I walked for a bit around town. At the train station there were immigrants sitting on every single bench, many of them no older than 15. At the IRC I was told that 300 unaccompanied minors had recently escaped from a nearby ‘reception’ centre. Of course, 300 people do not just escape – it is obvious that the authorities who were theoretically responsible for protecting them let them leave, knowing very well that this would result in their homelessness.

The amount of human suffering here is difficult to grasp. I remember being in the European Commission a year ago, being told by someone working in the asylum unit that the Italians exaggerate about their problems with immigration. She pointed to the statistics, which show that the number of asylum applications on Italy is totally normal for a country of that size. It is obvious that the people in the Commission have no idea what they are talking about. Spend fifteen minutes in the city centre of Catania or Palermo and you will know that this problem is real.

I’ll stop for today. The phone interview I had with the Greek asylum service was so insightful that it merits a post of its own, which I will write later.

A Meaty Mess - On How to Reduce Europe's Meat Consumption

Meat is yummy. We cannot deny it. Living in Liverpool for a couple of weeks, we have found it hard to resist the British ‘delicacies’ gleaming at you in the shelves of Tesco or Sainsbury’s. Bacon, Cumberland sausages, burgers – you name it, we’ve probably eaten and loved it (with the exception of black pudding, which Harald loves, but which Alex finds disgusting). Nevertheless, at the same time we have attempted to reduce our meat consumption significantly over the past couple of years. Rather than eating meat every day, we try to limit ourselves to smaller quantities, once or twice a week, although we do occasionally give in to the local kebab shop. You could make this decision for a number of reasons: the horsemeat scandal that is currently reminding Europe of the way the meat industry works; the strong correlation between intestinal cancer and meat consumption; or the vast amounts of resources consumed for the production of meat. Each one of these reasons is probably sufficient to either reduce one’s consumption of industrially-produced meat, or to stop eating meat altogether. For us the most important reason is the abominable treatment of animals. Rather than shocking you with statistics and images right here, we will attach some graphs at the end of this post.

Not all cows are as happy as this one.

Europeans must drastically reduce their meat consumption. This is a moral responsibility. Halving out meat consumption of currently 82kg per year will cause a drastic reduction in carbon emissions, a significant improvement in cancer risk and thus life expectancy and it will hopefully cause the meat industry to overthink its ways of treating animals. What we disagree about is how this can be achieved. For that reason, rather than offering a single solution, we will present three possible responses: 1. to introduce a meat tax; 2. to increase the regulation of the meat industry; 3. to raise public awareness causing metanoia.

The first method of getting people to reduce their meat consumption works via the price mechanism: if you increase the price of a product, less people will buy it. Seems logical, right? After all it worked with cigarettes. What you could do is to introduce a meat tax on all products containing meat, either processed or fresh. A meat tax of 100% would double the meat prices, and demand would plummet. People would still buy meat, but in smaller quantities, and not out of principle, but because it is too expensive. The revenue from this tax could be used to modestly subsidize organic meat, making it only marginally more expensive than non-organic meat. It is likely that demand for organic meat will skyrocket, which will again drive up the prices, requiring further subsidies. In the long run, you could achieve that people will eat more organic meat, which the overall meat consumption decreases. However, there is of course a downside to all of this. The cattle farmers themselves have been struggling for years with a trend that is driving prices down, and sudden reduction in meat consumption would inevitably cause thousands of cattle farms to close down. Perhaps this is inevitable if Europe is to reduce its meat consumption. Nevertheless, some time should be allowed for farmers to transition to the new food economy.

The second method that we have discussed in some detail is heavier regulation of the meat industry. A meat tax would do little to improve the living conditions of the animals involved. One could thus enforce a limitation to farm sizes, allowing for example only 150 cows, 500 sheep, 300 pigs or 1000 chickens per farm. A modest meat tax could be introduced (5%?), allowing subsidies to flow into the transition to the new farming system. One could enforce that all animals have to be kept outside for at least 6 hours per day, and that they have to have a sufficient amount of space, that is far greater than what is currently allocated to them. The organic model could be adopted on all farms within ten years. Again, meat prices would vastly increase as a result, but revenues from the meat tax could be used to ensure farmers’ survival. The mechanism causing a reduction in meat consumption is the same as in the first case, as prices would go up. However, the public debate resulting from these regulations would also increase public awareness, allowing for more responsible eating habits.

Finally, it could be argued that the planned approaches mentioned so far would inevitably fail due to resistance from the European meat industry, which is able to exert huge amounts of influence on governmental institutions such as the European Commission. School curricula could for example be adopted to educate pupils about the life of a cow or a chicken. Those citizens who want to get involved could launch public awareness campaigns about healthy eating and the living conditions of animals. The intention would not be to turn everyone into vegetarians, but to get them to think about where they purchase their meat. It is a thousand times better to get meat from a local butcher than from the supermarket, be it Tesco, Kaufland, Carrefour or Delhaize. What is certain is that this process would take a while to be implemented, and until a true change of mind takes place. Despite one meat scandal after the other, meat consumption in Europe remains high, or even goes up.

It’s up to you to decide now which method you favour. They each have their pros and cons, and perhaps a combination of all three would get the job done best. Next time you buy meat, which might be today, think about where your meat comes from, and if possible, try to buy from your local butcher.

Alexandra Athanasopoulou & Harald Köpping

PS: Here are the graphs we promised!

More Diversity on my Plate! – A Critique of EU’s Food Production Policy Part 1: Crops!

I love food! I believe in the healing properties of chocolate, chicken soup and my mum’s stuffed tomatoes! Food is one of those rare things that are both a necessity and a pleasure. But how is our food produced? Where does it come from? This will be the subject of a mini-series about the EU and our food!  This first entry will be dedicated to crops and the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). 

The CAP has been one of the EU’s major integration policies, one that almost the entirety of its budget is spent on, and it is a policy that reflected the fears of European post-WWII societies. During the war, people were starving and this could never happen again! Europe had to be completely independent when it came to food. Boost production as highly as possible, and make agriculture as efficient as possible – that makes sense, yes, if we lived in the 1960s! Today most of our problems come from the loss of biodiversity in our plates, overproduction, and wastage. The outcome of CAP is that it became more efficient to maintain huge monocultures, managed by massive agricultural companies rather than by individual farmers. Last year, while travelling through the Balkans, I was very impressed by the agricultural landscape of Bosnia and Croatia. There were hundreds of small field belonging to individual farmers, and after talking with fellow train passengers I realised that once Croatia will join the EU all this will be lost. It will become too difficult to compete with the agroindustry that farmers will be forced to sell or rent out their land. These companies will then plant the same varieties of wheat that are grown in the other Member States. While there are more than one hundred varieties of wheat we are producing only hand full. According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation, we have lost 75% of our agricultural biodiversity during the last century. That tastes a bit fade! Using only on type of crop might be more money-efficient but is quite dangerous because it makes production more vulnerable to diseases, fungi and other pests. The solution provided but agricultural companies is to introduce GMOs, which are apparently the future, because such “crops are more resistant to disease and insects”. That is the lie the agricultural giants want to sell us, because the cheaper solution would be to cultivate more varieties of one crop, which of course is not as fancy as GMOs and makes companies like Monsato and Bayer lose money. 

This principle applies to all our crops. Have you ever tried to boil zucchinis, you know, these huge dark green zucchinis you find in supermarket? Don’t! It will taste of nothing. When I was a kid I remember very clearly that we used to eat boiled zucchinis. They tasted amazing with lemon and Greek olive oil. Well, the zucchinis you find in the supermarkets are not the best zucchinis. They just look nice and mostly contain water, so it is better for you to fry them (you remove their extra water) than to boil them (you add extra water). The zucchinis from my childhood however are amazingly delicious if you boil them, so don’t be fooled by their colour or their size! Unfortunately, in today’s world of appearances the outside counts more than the inside, which also holds true for our crops. 

These practices have not only led to a loss of diversity in our plates but also to a loss of biodiversity in our fauna. Statistics have shown that in Western European countries where CAP has long been implemented, the number of farmland birds has decreased from 600million in 1980 to a mere 300million in 2009.  Moreover, when a new country enters the EU, decline in farmland birds mirrors the decline rates in the old Member States. This means that once you implement the CAP you lose biodiversity! Despite the EU’s pledge to protect the diversity of Europe’s flora and fauna, its practices lead to a loss in biodiversity, and it is not wonder that its supposed goals are not met! The Natura 2000 network is pretty, but sometimes you don’t need to create new programmes; you just need to adjust current policies. 

More than forty years of food abundance have changed our practices when it comes to food. We waste food! The CAP has significantly decreased food prices, which allows us to consume more, but which has also caused us not to care about the food we waste. We buy more than we need so we end up throwing away food. Our food tastes the same, because we don’t have enough variety. Food variety becomes a luxury promoted by chefs with three Michelin stars! What is the solution?  

There are many levels of solutions. At the European level you should completely reform CAP. I am not saying that CAP should not exist, but instead of giving subsidies to the transnational agricultural conglomerates, it should give subsidies to small farms. Industries make enough profits, and here I would like to stress the fact that many of the small farmers left are struggling to survive! At the individual level, we should take a bit more time when we go grocery shopping. If you can, don’t go to the supermarket, but go to the local market or find a small farm near your home. Ask about the products, ask them to offer a variety of zucchinis or tomatoes. Things are of course not that easy. As access to the European Commission and the European Parliament is easier for big industries than for individuals, things will need some time to change. But if we are more aware of what we eat, we might be off to a good start.

Alexandra Athanasopoulou

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