Self-Determination, Not Exploitation!

Many of us take self-determination for granted. For migrants working in agriculture, labour, and the trades, however, it is a live question: and one that extends far beyond the conditions in a field or the clauses of a contract. It runs through the colonial history of land distribution, through European immigration policy, and through the laws that decide who may work where and under what conditions, as well as the ethics of all this and the economic systems that turn forced mobility into cheap labour. To address it means bringing together experiences from different geographies, organising methods, and legal and political contexts, and finding the common ground on which concrete practices of solidarity and resistance can be built.

For that, spaces are needed. Together with filmmaker Raphaël Grisey, Spore Initiative invited four organisations to the weekend of 20–21 June: Association A4 from France, SfruttaZero from Puglia, TopManta from Barcelona, and Goundo Kamissoko Niakhaté from Mali, representing FENAFER: alongside several initiatives from Berlin and Brandenburg working at the intersection of agriculture, labour migration, and racial and social justice.

The first day, Saturday, was conceived as a space for exchange and for getting to know one another, unfolding at a patient, gentle rhythm through which relationships could take root. Sunday, by contrast, offered a chance for collective reflection on the questions raised the day before, through public round-table discussions.

The exchange began with two questions: what experiences and skills could each group contribute and want to share, in the interest of solidarity and mutual learning? And what does each organisation feel it needs in its current situation? This starting point recognised that every participant brought both knowledge and need.

"What seed do we want to plant here today?" one participant asked, setting the tone for what followed and for the relationships that began to form. Spore's answer was twofold: to create the conditions for a horizontal exchange of concrete knowledge, and to build solidarity between people who rarely find themselves in the same room.

Saturday 20 June, morning: What One Brings, What One Lacks

SfruttaZero was founded in 2009 in Nardò, in the province of Lecce, Puglia, through an act of direct resistance. A mixed group of local and migrant people of different ages, with no funding or institutional support, mobilised against the exploitation of the sub-Saharan and North African labourers employed each summer to harvest watermelons and tomatoes in Salento.

The initiative grew from the grassroots and gradually built expertise across the entire production chain: cultivation, distribution, communication, marketing, and financial management. Its best-known product, SfruttaZero tomato sauce, thus took on a political function, embedding the labour rights tied to its production within a consumer good: from the seed in the soil to the bottle on the shelf.

Diritti a Sud works in parallel on health, housing, and education for agricultural workers. During the gathering, co-founders Rosa Vaglio and Angelo Cleopazzo shared practical lessons from sixteen years of activity. Asked what they were looking for from the meeting, they named the need to move beyond isolation. Access to land remains unresolved, and an international network: above all a Mediterranean one: is still missing: a network through which to exchange perspectives and build common struggles for dignified living and working conditions.

TopManta is a social brand offering screen-printing and tailoring workshops. The project has helped more than two hundred people regularise their status and gain access to contracted employment, while fifteen work directly in the collective's workshops.

The organisation brought to the discussion a history rooted in the same system, seen from a different position. Ten years ago, two hundred street vendors in Barcelona founded the Sindicato Popular de Vendedores Ambulantes de Barcelona. Most are migrants from the African continent, and they are routinely criminalised by the police, the social system, and municipal policy. As Lamine Sarr, co-founder of the Sindicato and a leading voice of TopManta, observed, these people are frequently treated as though they possess neither skills nor knowledge: as though they must learn European, or more broadly Western, culture in order to integrate, almost as if they had to start again from zero.

Lamine described his members' experience as a life within a system of structural alienation, marked by borders that are often invisible yet decisive. Without documents, it is impossible to open a bank account, travel, sign a contract, or move freely. And yet, he explained, people racialised throughout their lives have chosen not to occupy only the position of victims, but to turn the violence of racism into a resource for building collective strength.

The association has a dual structure: on one side a trade union that denounces injustice, organises, and proposes more dignified conditions; on the other a creative brand that raises awareness among a wider public. The central idea to emerge from the project is reclaiming agency: recovering the capacity to act on one's own life and circumstances. Solidarity, the organisation says, is its principal resource. Its members shared their experience of building both a brand and a union as instruments of self-determination, along with expertise in political communication and anti-racist campaigns, experience negotiating with the Spanish parliament, and knowledge of how European fishing off Senegal affects local families and migration flows: a connection that remains largely invisible in European debates on immigration.

FENAFER works on several levels: it provides agroecology training for a hundred and twenty young women, supports the creation of new cooperatives, organises political events with significant institutional visibility, defends women's legal rights, and works on seed production: particularly okra and onion seeds: as well as on processing to add value. Goundo shared her experience of supporting women and working at local, regional, national, and transnational levels, and the federation's capacity to press for the effective implementation of existing regulations through local government structures. The needs she brought to the table were specific: access to water, solar panels for new members, and conditions that allow younger generations to remain in their territories rather than being forced to emigrate.

The Berlin and Brandenburg initiatives present at the workshop work in different but related fields. Aloti Farm cultivates one hectare with a small Black FLINTA team, operates through a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) model with solidarity-based pricing, and centres its practice on BIPoC, queer, migrant, and disabled communities. Every week it brings boxes of vegetables to Berlin, seeking to make organic produce accessible to vulnerable people. Alongside the ordinary obstacles facing any small farm, there are invisible ones that echo the point raised by Lamine of TopManta: opening a bank account, registering a legal entity, and navigating German bureaucracy without stable documents: obstacles white farmers rarely encounter. For them, being in that space and sharing their story was a way of hearing accounts of resilience, learning how other initiatives sustain their work, and finding solidarity.

Rabelades Farm treats connection to land as a practice that is at once political and spiritual. It organises multi-community events and intersectional apprenticeships with BIPoC and disabled people. Another group present: two women who work with BIPoC and disabled people in collaboration with other associations: brought expertise in community organising, setting up associations, running empowerment workshops for FLINTA-BIPoC people, and navigating German and European funding. They raised a question that ran through the entire weekend: how can agency be reclaimed without self-exploitation? How can structures be built without reproducing capitalism itself?

Aju John: labour organiser, lawyer, and researcher, member of the Lieferando Workers Collective and part of Antifascist Curries: brought his research on how migration and precarious labour shape one another, along with his experience organising South Asian delivery workers in Berlin.

Association A4 (Association d'Accueil en Agriculture et Artisanat) works in France to ease access to training, employment, and administrative support for people with and without documents in the agricultural and craft sectors. Its co-founders, Habib and Tarik, have built networks between urban and rural precarity through field-research journeys. Justine joined later to help organise the group around new priorities: legal advice lines for rural employers, workers' cooperatives, and experiments with open seed varieties. The context A4 brought is one of political urgency in France: with elections imminent and the far right growing, immigration has become a central target of government rhetoric, and the organisation fears there may be little time left to build connections capable of resisting this shift. A4 wants to create a network for the circulation of people, ideas, and material resources across Europe and beyond. It is looking for legal structures for access to land, support in defending agricultural workers' rights, training for trainers, fundraising capacity, and a transnational network that reaches places of origin.

Goundo Kamissoko Niakhaté introduced a different organisational scale. FENAFER: the Fédération Nationale des Femmes Rurales du Mali: brings together 819 communities across 169 districts and 19 regions. It is composed exclusively of women, founded on the recognition that rural Malian women cannot gain recognised voice and rights without a process of autonomous organisation. Its spokesperson stressed that women in Mali, and rural women in particular, hold limited and insufficiently recognised rights. The federation works in agriculture, fishing, and livestock, and at the centre of its work is land: the Malian government has promised to allocate 50% of agricultural land to women farmers, yet that commitment remains largely unfulfilled.

Together with reflections from Viola Castellano, a social and political anthropologist at Humboldt University, Alagie Jinkang shifted the focus from border policy to deeper structures: austerity and structural adjustment, he argued, are more decisive than migration policy alone. It is not enough to focus on borders. We need to understand how different struggles connect beyond migration, to rebuild the relationship between diaspora and Indigenous populations, and to examine the links between market, land, and water in places such as Gambia. His formulation summed it up: the right to move and the right to stay are two sides of the same political demand.

Saturday 20 June, afternoon

In the afternoon, participants identified four thematic areas around which to organise: the same that became Sunday's public workshop tables: access to land and Africa–Europe connections, especially between self-organised groups; the risk of self-exploitation and the forms of care within self-organised groups; the expansion of solidarity economic models to create dignified work; and the tools of political communication and campaigning aimed at broader audiences.

Here the SfruttaZero group shifted the level of the discussion. The principal question, they argued, is not only about practices but about the framework within which practices operate. Anti-immigration laws determine the situation, so one must understand those laws, put pressure on institutions, and build legal lobbying strategies and pressure campaigns. But their position pointed to something more radical: one should dare to go against the grain and break the current imaginary by changing the words we use. Freedom of movement, as understood in Europe, is to them inconceivable; political organisations should have the will to dismantle this system in favour of unrestricted mobility. On land, they argued for interrogating the possibility of organic agrarian reform: up to and including parliamentary agrarian reform.

Aloti Farm posed the practical questions: how do we make sure everyone present takes something from this encounter? How do we build a system of care? How do we advance anti-racism in Europe while working on sustainability?

Geographical and political differences began to surface: and, from them, common ground. In Italy, for instance, land is privatised; as long as those who work the fields remain at the margins of the productive and political system, access to land stays structurally closed. Political pressure on governments is needed to defend territories and the people who inhabit them. In Gambia: where Alagie Jinkang, who holds a doctorate in Human Rights from the University of Palermo and spent five years as a scholar at the University of Bologna before returning to his village in 2024 to build an agroecological farm: access to land runs through extended families, who can come together and pool their holdings. But this system coexists with land grabbing, which damages the land as much as it exploits it.

When one speaks of exploitation in Gambia, Alagie explained, one speaks of the exploitation of nature, not only of people: the soil is overstressed, water is scarce, and excessive fertilisation has rendered part of the land unworkable. There is also the problem of redistribution, often impractical precisely because of the state the land is in.

In Mali, Goundo Kamissoko said, the land belongs to the village's main family: it is a matter of inheritance, not of private property in the Western sense. One can use the land, but it does not become one's own in law. At the same time, the state claims the land as government property, creating a structural friction between inherited patrimony and state ownership. In the village and in the cooperative she co-founded, she has had to negotiate with the local mayor to secure her members' presence, and disputes over title remain open: local structures still do not recognise the cooperatives as belonging to the land. This constant negotiation has become a practice: perhaps the central practice of the work.

The problem has a common core across every context. In eastern Germany, twenty thousand hectares have been bought by Australian companies. A representative of Junge ABL noted that young people who would like to farm cannot afford land, because companies own it and prices are prohibitive. The question that emerges: what is the democratic way to decide who should have access to land?

In Germany, old structures persist, and there is inadequate knowledge of how to manage public land. The COFV commission exists, establishing that every agricultural project must allocate 50% of its resources to women or people with disabilities: but the rule is not applied, and the commission itself is under the control of the prefecture.

Habib of Association A4 offered the most structural synthesis. These problems share a colonial origin: colonialism decided to whom land belonged by constructing hierarchies between peoples and territories. In Sudan, it distributed land among different ethnic groups, building a tribalisation of land ownership that continues to generate conflict. The government controls everything, and there are ever more mechanisms that push people back toward exploiting nature and communities; contemporary extractive systems continue that colonial structure. It is a problem of inheritance and privilege belonging to the colonial system, its effects still propagating into the present. His proposal starts from a real imbalance: by his data, Africa has more free land than the European Union. The solution is not that African people are exploited here, but that Europe supports production in Africa: not by extracting resources, but equitably, ceding the means of production to local communities: not through conditional aid, but as structural redistribution. The concrete solutions raised by the group included diversifying cultivation, new forms of irrigation that spread the demand for land over time, and structures for growing vegetables on buildings for family use. But the point that kept recurring is that no single practice is enough on its own.

Sunday 21 June, second encounter

On Sunday, in the Spore garden, Saturday's themes became tables open to the public. Rosa of SfruttaZero returned to the assembly with the results of the group on Access to land and Africa–Europe connections. The link between European and African land systems is concrete and violent: thousands of people are compelled to leave Africa for Europe to work in intensive agriculture, exploited, producing low-quality food that ends up in large-scale distribution. In major cities like Berlin, awareness of this is minimal: people have neither the time to think about it nor the chance to meet the workers who live in these conditions. Yet through encounters like this one, she noted, you meet many people who come from across Africa with their own cultural backgrounds and professional skills. The capitalist system exploits them and ensures that Europeans do not see how all this feeds the underdevelopment that began with colonialism, and that parts of the world still experience because of European pressure that does nothing to enable the self-determination of peoples, rural areas, and communities.

The distribution chain is the node that structures everything. At the top are the multinationals that set prices too low, and those prices land on the last link in the chain: the workers. Changing the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is therefore one of the concrete strategies to emerge from the group. Connections between Africa and Europe are built gradually, linking initiatives like Goundo's and Alagie's with small European collectives: direct exchange, without pre-built architectures, step by step.

The second group to report worked on Tools of communication and political influence, and included TopManta. Its central reasoning: when you organise an anti-racism conference, the people who come are those already sensitised: those who already follow the message and know it. Few who are not yet conscious of the issue attend. But if you use different tools to occupy every space, the message travels beyond your own community.

TopManta proposed two tools developed in Barcelona and designed to be replicable. The first, "vote donation": piloted in Barcelona's municipal elections: lets those without the right to vote formally delegate their vote to a citizen willing to cast it on their instructions, multiplying the political influence of those excluded from the electoral process. The second, the anti-racist run, grew out of direct experience: for years, street vendors were forced to run from the police, and from that flight a race was born: a race for anti-racism. Two editions in Barcelona have drawn fifteen hundred registered participants and eleven thousand people overall. Securing permits in a city like Barcelona is not simple, and TopManta worked with other cooperatives to pressure the municipal administration. Collaborations with influential figures: artists, athletes, designers, and major brands like Nike and Adidas: function as acts of infiltration.

The third group, on Self-organisation of labour and solidarity economies, addressed a challenge common to every organisation present, whatever its context: how to build sustainable organisations without reproducing the very logic of exploitation they set out to fight. A comparison of two models: the fundraising-oriented non-profit and the cooperative: showed how the former slides easily into self-exploitation, the exhaustion of its members to keep the project afloat. Several members of this sub-group were still in a start-up phase and had not yet been paid for their work. One point that emerged as both practical and inspiring: A4's system, which supports employers in hiring undocumented workers, is an example of how to explore the gaps within one's own context to find viable routes forward, without waiting for the legal framework to change from above.

Two final contributions widened the conversation beyond what the groups had discussed.

Rose Wanjiku: journalist and climate-justice advocate, founder of the Borderless Earth Action Network and part of International Women's Space in Berlin, where she works at the intersection of climate justice, migration, and social equity: spoke from inside the German asylum system. She picked up TopManta's word, "infiltration": the system, she said, has studied us; it knows us. She knows the asylum and migration system from within, because she is inside it. The message it sends you when you arrive in Germany is that your skills do not matter, and that who you were before you came does not matter. You are placed in a structure that does not help you think beyond what it has planned for you. If the system decides Germany needs health workers, everyone is directed to become a nurse or a care assistant. Nobody talks about food; nobody talks about production. Her own interest: in climate, migration, food, and land: struggles to find a place in those categories. But with collectives like those present that weekend, people in the asylum system can see that they might contribute to the conversation differently. What is missing in Berlin's political circles, she said, is a genuine commitment to the question of people staying. In certain spaces, the challenges of work and employment are raised and then the conversation stops. No one follows up on what it means to have skills in agriculture, to have an education, and to find no space to use them. Many people here are highly educated, but no one carries the conversation forward; perhaps some need a contract: a one-year contract that would let them build a stable situation. The contradiction is concrete: the government says you may work, but imposes conditions that make work almost impossible.

International Women's Space wrote to the Federal Foreign Office to obtain a work permit for Rose. The reply came after three months: three months in which no other income was possible without risking undeclared work and the exploitation that follows. Rose also highlighted the psychological dimension. Many people in the asylum system fear the German bureaucratic system: even fear attending meetings like the one at Spore. They imagine someone from the Foreign Office might be present; they think attending demonstrations is wrong or dangerous; they worry about all the things they believe they should not be doing. They stay in the camps, keeping out of sight. They are afraid, and they cannot move forward. And so discussions like this one end up reaching those already familiar with the issue: those who already know the song. You are singing to the choir, without reaching those who need it most. How, then, can we build strategic engagement with the people inside the asylum system?

Aju John closed with a story that moved the focus from agriculture to food delivery, showing how the problem cuts across sectors and how the link between migrant status and labour exploitation is structural. Almost a year ago, he and others launched Berlin's Migrant Worker and Student Canteen, born out of years of organising in food delivery. In Germany, gig work technically should not exist: the law requires that work be performed under long-term contracts. That held until 2022. Then something changed. From 2022–23, the composition of the delivery workforce transformed radically, with a sharp rise in migrants from South Asia: India and Pakistan in particular. Uber Eats, an American company, and Wolt, a Scandinavian one, introduced subcontracting into the sector, driving conditions sharply down. The entire nature of the work changed. Today more than 70% of Berlin's delivery riders work on a student visa. They are international students enrolled in private Berlin universities, forced to work eight, nine, ten, eleven, or twelve hours a day simply to earn enough to remain in an expensive city. Behind this figure lies a self-sustaining system: the growth of Berlin's private higher-education industry, the rise of migration agencies in India, the aspiration of India's middle class to build a life and career in the West, and the exploitation that results in Berlin and other European cities. Paid per order rather than per hour, workers must deliver ever more orders per hour to earn enough. Formal contracts have all but disappeared. The legal requirement for work in Germany has produced a situation in which most people work without a contract; those seeking to extend their visa must show either a considerable sum of money or a work contract, which compels them to accept ever-worsening conditions in order to have something to present. Aju John's reading is direct: most precarious work in Berlin is done by temporary migrants, and this is no accident. Migrant status is deeply bound up with the worsening of working conditions. Administrative status is the instrument through which the quality of work is lowered: in agriculture as in delivery. The link between these two apparently distant worlds is the same logic: administrative precarity as a device for controlling the workforce.

What this weekend made clear, beyond the sheer scale of the problem, was above all its internal coherence. The exploitation of migrant labour in agriculture, land concentration in Europe, land grabbing in Africa, the precarious conditions of Berlin's couriers, and the impossibility for people in the asylum system to see food and land as fields of work: these are different expressions of a single logic. In just two days, the shared reflections fostered a common understanding: that the problems each group faces in its own context are not isolated, and that solutions can be found through the patient building of connections, structures, and collective knowledge. It is precisely this recognition of ourselves in others, and this solidarity, that gives each person the strength to carry their own projects and hopes forward in our complex present.

Informal conversations also showed that the question of how to position oneself toward farmers' unions: such as AbL in Germany or the Confédération Paysanne in France: and how to bring advocacy for migrant workers' living and working conditions into their lobbying, needs further work.