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The province of Foggia, the southeastern region of Italy known as Tavoliere or Capitanata, ranks as the country’s second largest industrial-tomato producing district, its second largest expanse of fertile flatland in the country, as well as its second largest employer of migrant farm labourers. Or at least that is what official statistics imply for what is a notoriously opaque sector of the Italian economy. Indeed, the agro-industrial district of Foggia, as many others like it, arguably functions as a sort of informal, murky ‘special economic zone’. In this ordinarily exceptional space, extra-legal arrangements operate side by side with a series of legal mechanisms to fragment, control and discipline labourers, their mobility and most aspects of their existence.
The zone relies on an institutionally backed, selective suspension of laws and rights through the production of spaces where the labour force can be contained. Such arrangements are well suited to ‘just-in-time’ and ‘to-the-point’ modes of production, which in the case of Foggia concern a vast array of raw and processed food products sold on national and, increasingly, international markets, through extensive, retail-driven commodity chains. Thus, against the common view which relates the problem with these spaces to southern Italian agriculture's supposed ‘backwardness’, the latter arguably keeps well up with the times. Agro-industrial production constitutes a driving force of the economy: it is the only sector in Italy which not only avoided the economic crisis but has experienced constant growth since 2008, especially thanks to the growth of its exports.
