Presentation short abstract

The paper examines agrarian transformations in Southern Italy through the lens of the labour turn in critical agrarian studies, showing how fragmented labour, social reproduction, and workers’ agency shape struggles for a just and worker-centred agroecological transition.

Presentation long abstract

Recent contributions have reopened the debate on the agrarian question. After decades in which this discussion centred mainly on the “peasant question” in the South, new perspectives have begun to address agrarian dynamics in the North.

In Europe, this renewed engagement has largely developed through food regime analysis and repeasantization studies. While these approaches have offered valuable insights into the “new agrarian questions” of food and social reproduction, they have tended to privilege new "peasants" and food sovereignty movements, leaving agricultural wage labour at the margins.

This paper situates itself within the emerging labour turn in critical agrarian studies and political ecology, re-centring class and labour in the analysis of agrarian transformations. Drawing on an agrarian political economy à la Bernstein and labour regime analysis, it examines intensive agricultural areas in Southern Italy, where neoliberal restructuring has produced new globalised enclaves of fruit and vegetable production.

The analysis highlights a deep crisis of social reproduction affecting the agricultural working class, rooted in the extreme fragmentation of labour regimes. Far from being passive, workers negotiate, adapt to, and contest their conditions in diverse and often conflicting ways. Yet organised responses by agroecological, food, and labour justice movements have only partially intercepted these everyday forms of agency. This calls both for a new research agenda capable of exploring how climate change and processes of greening are reshaping workers’ lives and forms of agency and for deeper grassroots engagement within spaces of work and everyday life.