A supermarket chain tainted by agromafias has been seized in the Catania area — this is how the system shapes employment, distribution and prices across the agricultural sector.
Although efforts to combat the caporalato system have been a good start, the road to rooting out illegality and organised crime from the agricultural sector is still a long one. A small step was taken by the Catania police, with the maxi-seizure of assets worth 42 million euros, including the entire corporate estate of the G.M. supermarket chain, which, according to the police headquarters' hypothesis, is run by individuals operating within the orbit of a mafia clan — the Cappello-Bonaccorsi.
At the same time, however, it is a news story that demonstrates, once again, the deep roots the mafias have sunk into the agricultural sector.
According to Coldiretti, the representation and assistance association for Italian agriculture, in 2017 alone the agromafias' business grew by 30 per cent, reaching a turnover of 21.8 billion euros.
The seizure, the police explain, covered thirteen supermarkets, a fuel distribution point, building land, villas, cars and current accounts and banking relationships, the latter worth 250,000 euros. These are assets acquired illicitly, above all through the ability to penetrate the mass-market food retail sector, reinvesting money derived from unlawful activities.
From control of supermarkets to control of agri-food product distribution, the mafias shape the agri-food market by setting crop prices, managing transport and sorting, controlling entire supermarket chains, exporting genuine or counterfeit made-in-Italy goods, establishing overseas production hubs for italian sounding products (those counterfeit items that evoke Italian products, such as parmesan), and developing new sales networks.
In doing so, the direct farmers' association explains, organised crime appropriates vast swathes of the agri-food sector and the profits generated by it, destroying competition and the free legal market and stifling honest enterprise, while also seriously compromising product quality and safety — with the indirect effect of gravely undermining the image of Italian products and the value of the made-in-Italy brand.
"The agromafias must be combated in the fields, in the back rooms where prices are set, in the opacity of bureaucracy, at the distribution stage for products that travel thousands of kilometres before reaching the final consumer, but also through the transparency and information available to citizens, who must be able to know the story behind the product that ends up on their plate," according to Roberto Moncalvo, president of Coldiretti. The scourge of the agromafia also strikes the restaurant sector: five thousand Italian restaurants are said to be in the hands of organised crime, within a criminal system that imposes blackmail and extortion and acquires premises, completing its criminal supply chain.
