New Delhi: A team of four women journalists – Kusum Arora, Stefania Prandi, Francesca Cicculli and Charlotte Aagaard – have won the third prize in the ‘Outstanding Investigative Reporting’ category of the Fetisov Journalism Awards, 2023 for the investigative series ‘The Bitter Taste of Kiwi’, co-published by The Wire.
The 5th Annual Fetisov Journalism Awards ceremony was held at Istanbul, Turkey on April 22. The shortlisted candidates in different categories of the award were announced in December 2023.
‘The Bitter Taste of Kiwi’ is an investigation conducted in collaboration by IrpiMedia, Danwatch and The Wire, financed by the Journalismfund Europe, detailing how Indian workers are exploited in the kiwi fields in Latina, Lazio (Italy).
The investigation was published in The Wire in April 2023. It was also published in other leading international media houses like Al Jazeera, El Pais, Irpi Media, Danwatch and Internationale magazine.
In recent years, the Lazio region of Italy has become the world’s largest producer of kiwis. Thousands of farm workers from Punjab, India, are trafficked to the large kiwi fields of Lazio to work.
The workers pay Indian middlemen up to 15,000 euros or Rs 14 lakh to reach Italy illegally. The nexus runs deep through fraud travel agents based in Punjab’s Doaba region, also famous as an NRI hub. Stefania Prandi and Kusum Arora tracked the fraud travel agents in Jalandhar, Kapurthala, Nawanshahr and Amritsar districts and the middlemen running the donkey route to Italy.
Once workers arrive in Italy to work, they end up in an exploitative system. They are forced to work in the fields seven days a week, even for ten hours a day and paid no more than six euros per hour even though the national contract provides for nine euros.
In several kiwi companies, it is difficult to have access to proper toilets, to take breaks, and to have mandatory protective equipment such as gloves and masks.
Following the entire supply chain of workers and kiwis – from Punjabi villages in India to Italian fields and European consumers – the journalists discovered a multi-million industry based on cheap labour and human trafficking.
Earlier, this investigation had won the ‘Tina Merlin’ national awards for Investigative Journalism in December 2023.
In May 2023, the investigation was selected by the Global Investigative Journalism Network as being among the top investigations of the world. Back home in Punjab, the state NRI affairs minister has also taken notice of the work and was working to plug the loopholes that allowed the fake travel agents’ nexus.
The first prize in the Outstanding Investigative Reporting category went to Hannah Dreier, for her report on migrant children who travel to the US without their parents and end up in dangerous jobs making products for big-name brands such as Ford Motors and Cheerios. The second prize went to Sanjana Varghese, Emma Graham-Harrison, Joe Dyke, Julia Nueno, Azul De Monte and Imogen Piper for their series ‘The Hidden Casualties of Britain’s War‘.
