Laborers, workers, researchers, psychologists, trade unionists. All tell how sexual harassment, blackmail, starvation wages, black lists of corporals are also a phenomenon rooted in the Ionian Arch, the area that includes the provinces of Matera, Taranto and Cosenza. A vast area of Southern Italy where the climate and fertile land favor the cultivation of fruit and vegetables, from strawberries to table grapes to citrus fruits. It is women who are required to ensure greater care for the harvesting and processing seasons of the most delicate fruit. It is women, especially foreigners from Romania and Bulgaria, who see their most basic rights violated. “I earn thirty-eight euros a day. Those who succeed work without interruption, from Monday to Sunday. Men get two extra euros per hour because they have tougher tasks. This morning I got up early, we start at six: we prepare the ground for planting strawberries, we fertilize it. I have to be bent over all the time and now that I’m pregnant it’s tiring. I feel exhausted, but I have to go there, I need money ”, says Catalina, a Romanian worker in Basilicata. She is one of 119 women employed in agriculture of Romanian and Bulgarian origin interviewed and met for the report ‘Change land. From invisibility to the protagonism of women in agriculture ‘by ActionAid created as part of the program that since 2016 has been involved in investigating and intervening on the living and working conditions of women in agriculture in Puglia, Basilicata and Calabria to protect their rights. There are no reliable data on the number of agricultural workers in Italy, the phenomenon of illegal work characterizes the agricultural sector through illicit recruitment, contractual irregularities or the total absence of an employment contract and the consequent absence of social security and social protection. The illegal hiring moves an illegal and underground economy of over five billion euros. According to estimates, between 51 and 57 thousand female workers are exploited in Italy. In the Ionian Arc, the regular agricultural workers are 22,702, 16,801 Italian and 5,901 foreign, of which 76% is made up of community workers, mainly Romanian and Bulgarian. A number lower than the real needs of seasonal fruit and vegetable harvesting which requires double the manpower. “In agriculture we still work in slavery”, explains M. for 37 years in the fields. Structural gender inequalities, such as the wage gap between women and men, make women’s lives worse. In the countryside, women earn as little as 25/28 euros a day while men receive 40. Furthermore, the practice of unfair employers to declare fewer days in their pay packets than those worked prevents women not only to access the agricultural accident, sickness and unemployment allowance, but also maternity allowance. “A tried and tested method has been going on for years in the Bari area. In the morning, when the vans arrive in the squares to take the agricultural workers to the fields, the “chosen one” is made to get in front, in the space next to the driver. A croissant and hot coffee are placed on the dashboard, bought at the bar. Eating breakfast means accepting sexual advances and thus getting the job. By refusing, however, the next day you are left at home ”, explains Annarita Del Vecchio, psychologist and collaborator of ActionAid in Puglia. Women in agriculture are exposed to violence and harassment in the workplace, on the means of transport that take them to the fields, in greenhouses, warehouses or packaging factories, in the accommodation provided by employers. Violence is exercised in multiple forms (verbal, physical, psychological and sexual) and is accompanied by threats, such as losing one’s job, being demoted or unpaid. Reacting can mean ending up on “black lists”. “Corporals call each other to report troublemakers. There is an exchange of manpower and therefore of information. The system is sophisticated: for example, when the tangerine season ends and the sowing of strawberries begins, the corporals organize the transport to Basilicata. Women are preferred because they are more prostrate and forced to endure with resignation ”, explains Maurizio Alfano, researcher and immigration expert also for the Calabria Region. Adriana, a former Romanian laborer, is one of ActionAid’s community leaders. “One of the problems not mentioned is that of motherhood: managing children is really difficult for agricultural workers. When the campaign starts early, at two or three in the morning, they take the sleeping children and, if they have no family, take them to the homes of strangers who look after five, six, or ten of them in their homes. They keep them until the mothers come back for them in the afternoon. Sending them to asylum is not possible, the timetable does not allow it “. In Calabria there are “irregular nurseries”, paid services, in black, with staff without any training that takes care of the children until the arrival of the parents. And some take their children to greenhouses, making them sleep in wooden boxes. These are the difficulties reported by the women to ActionAid: a sense of isolation, the impossibility of accessing public services and childcare services because they are few, distant, expensive and with schedules incompatible with those of commuting from home and work that can last even three or four hours a day. Many agricultural workers do not go to public offices because they do not speak Italian and there are no interpreting or linguistic-cultural mediation services available. In addition, they often complain of a lack of attention to their physical health: in the absence of toilets, women are forced to use the fields, even when it rains, and even when they are menstruating. Those who ask for a day off risk not working in the following days. In Puglia, Basilicata and Calabria, ActionAid since 2016 has launched a program in response to the multiple forms of violations of the human rights of working women, based on the protagonism of agricultural workers and on the construction of sustainable responses to their needs, through forms of collaboration and shared responsibility at community level. A commitment that involves institutions, trade unions, local associations, agricultural businesses, employers’ associations, civil society partners to bring about a concrete change in the lives of women laborers. “The current agricultural model – explains Grazia Moschetti, head of ActionAid projects in the Ionian Arch – is not sustainable, neither for workers at risk or in conditions of exploitation, nor for the many companies that respect the rules despite the many difficulties that the market and unfair competition imposes them. We need to change perspective, focusing on the needs of agricultural workers as citizens and as people who are currently excluded from the most basic welfare services and more generally from the democratic processes of the communities to which they belong “.” We need dedicated public spaces for discussion to women, built by them and supported by all parties involved, from businesses to associations. Only with the contribution of everyone – as is happening in the Ionian Arc – can we cultivate positive relationships inside and outside the workplace. Agricultural workers can no longer be excluded or left on the sidelines of institutional interventions, currently implemented without a clear gender perspective. Continuing to do so means not deliberately putting an end to the violations of rights and violence they suffer ”, she points out. ActionAid has trained 12 community leaders identified among women participating in empowerment paths. In community workshops, female workers were compared with local actors (local institutions, associations, companies, etc.) for the co-planning of welfare services. The result of each laboratory was the adoption of a Collaboration Agreement, a tool that regulates the management of co-designed services and the specific roles of the actors who sign it, including community leaders representing the laborers involved in the program. In Schiavonea, in the plain of Sibari in Calabria, the Citadel of Sharing has been activated, a space open to women where the leaders of ActionAid provide career guidance services, support for access to social services and legal protection, linguistic mediation. In Adelfia, in the province of Bari, as a result of the collaboration agreement ‘The good earth’ promoted by the Change Earth program of ActionAid, the municipal nursery has activated the pre-welcome service for girls and boys from four in the morning. This is an individual demand service of the Municipality of Adelfia, which provides flexible hours of entry and exit. In the ActionAid survey, it dedicated specific recommendations to the Government, to local and European national institutions to ask that finally policies be regularly and transversally designed, implemented, monitored and evaluated with tools equipped with an intersectional approach, which takes into account the gender dimension, to ensure that women, Italian and foreign, employed in the agricultural sector are duly seen, listened to and considered.