Editorial

Letizia Palumbo, member of the VULNER Italian team and leader of the WP on human trafficking, Alessandra Corrado and Anna Triandafyllidou, member of the VULNER advisory board, co-edited the Special Issue Migrant Labour in the Agri-Food System in Europe: Unpacking the Social and Legal Factors of Exploitation of the European Journal of Migration and Law.

The aim of this Special Issue is to critically explore the complex links between labour migration and the agri-food sector in Europe, drawing attention to the variety of legal and social vectors and issues at stake in the contemporary forms of exploitation underpinning the agri-food system.

The authors intention is to contribute to scholarly discussion on the protection of the rights of migrant workers in the agri-food system by providing an in-depth analysis of the interplay of legal, social, economic and cultural factors that foster the recourse to a low-wage and exploitable labour force in the agri-food sector, and that produce the conditions of vulnerability experienced by migrant workers in Europe. Letizia, Alessandra and Anna therefore seek to provide a critical overview of the diverse drivers and processes contributing to a system that fosters workers’ dependency on employers, confines a migrant labour force to specific sectors, and, simultaneously, facilitates their continuous replacement, profiting from specific situations of social, legal and economic vulnerability.

The Special Issue is published in open access and is available to download here.