By Mariachiara Ficarelli, PhD Student, Harvard University, United States
“I am not here looking for votes, and I am not here as part of an election campaign. I am here because I love this territory,” said Bartolomeo Amidei, an Italian Senator for the region of Veneto and Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy) party member, to a gymnasium filled with several hundred disgruntled clam farmers. His assistant meanwhile was busy live-streaming the speech to social media channels. “Politicians need to have the courage to dialogue with their citizens!” The room erupted into thunderous applause.
It was early March 2024. Ten months since clam farmers in the Po Delta had been without income or welfare benefits and four months until the European Union Parliamentary elections. Later that spring Brothers of Italy, a far-right political party with fascist roots in Italy, would receive an electoral confirmation of their political power. The situation for clam farmers, however, would remain practically unchanged, leaving an entire regional economy sifting through empty shells.
I began my doctoral fieldwork in August 2023, the same month that the blue crab “invasion” in the Po Delta in the Northern Adriatic supposedly started. I had not planned to study an “invasive” animal species, but the growing social problems posed by this crustacean made it an unexpected and unavoidable focus of research1. In the span of a couple of months, I witnessed the near dissolution of a previously flourishing clam industry in the Delta. The enterprise had gone from producing over 100,000 tonnes of clams and generating nearly 200 million euros in profit each year, to a decline in 96% of production and near financial collapse. The clam — and the entire social worlds built around its farming — had been ravished by the pincers of this crustacean.
While clam farmers were quick to make out that the arrival of the crab had suddenly sprung upon the Delta in the summer of 2023, one marine biologist working in the area showed me a blue crab he had fished in the Delta and kept in a glass jar of formaldehyde in his office since 2012. In actuality, female crabs had been thrown back into the lagoons for at least a decade previously. The males (which tend to be bigger), on the other hand, were fished and sold as useful additional income. Further studies have traced the blue crab as a rather old “invasive” believed to have arrived in the Adriatic in the 1950s, carried accidentally from Atlantic coastlines in ballast waters of cargo ships (Scotellaro 2023). So, to phrase it more accurately, it was in summer 2023 when the crab became an unprofitable problem for the fishing industry of the Northern Adriatic.
For those of us who work within the field of food production, the arrival of the blue crab is unexceptional in many ways. The decimation of forms of intensive crop and animal production by viral outbreaks and the persistent presence of “invasive” species and “pests” is by now an accepted part of the routine crises plaguing capitalist food systems (Besky and Blanchette 2019). What makes the blue crab exceptional even against this common backdrop is the extraordinary amount of attention that the crustacean has received in the Italian political discourse and media. Simply put: the blue crab has gone viral. Cameras have been pointed from all angles at this crustacean. Why? For the past year, I have been trying to wrap my head around this spectacle, given that clam production is a niche rather than a staple food commodity.
The past year has seen the Po Delta become the epicenter of a political pilgrimage. It is the locale of a newfound common ground across Italy’s political spectrum. Regardless of party affiliation, politicians have visited the Delta to pose with the blue crab— gingerly clasping it with tongs in photos while still alive, and holding it up like a trophy less cautiously with bare hands when dead. The “threat” that the blue crab poses to the Delta is an uncomplicated matter of political consensus. Neither the so-called Left, Center, or Right denies the “destruction” that this “alien predator” has left in its wake. Social media posts about politicians’ visits to the Delta are proclamations of their heartfelt solidarity with the plight of clam farmers and fishers of the Adriatic in their battle against such an “insatiable” and “killer” crustacean. The crab quickly consolidated as a mediatized icon of both horror and fascination.
I have come to understand the viral “outbreak narrative” of the blue crab by situating it within the wider environmental policy debates unfolding in Italy and Europe (Paxson 2019). One of these debates’ prominent topics in the lead up to the most recent June 2024 EU elections was the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), a system of agricultural subsidies meant to support European farmers. In the context of the 2024 European election, the focus on the CAP suggests how “farming” and the “environment” became intersecting categories in which specific notions of a desired and future “European environment” could only be achieved in and through transforming certain practices associated with farming.
At the beginning of 2024, farmers across Europe took to their tractors, occupying spaces of regional, national, and supranational governance. At first, the protests were motivated in large part due to the ever-lower profit margins faced by farmers, which they argued were due to increased taxation and the unfair pricing of global products on the European market. In Italy, the ruling right-wing government clamored loudly in support of farmers. Through successful lobbying from both the agro-corporations and also the government led by the Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, the farmers’ protests were swiftly co-opted and transformed from a discussion about a fair-price and just wage into a discourse that attacked the proposed EU Restoration Law and European environmental regulation as the primary reason for farmers’ economic difficulties.
During this wave of protests, some hundred clam farmers gathered in front of the regional government buildings in Venice, Italy. Unlike their broader European counterparts, these farmers protested on boats, wore rubber boots and oilskins, and tended to wet rather than dry land. Clam farmers, laboring on the margins between the worlds of agriculture and fishing, between land and sea, considered themselves likewise threatened by the proposed policy reforms. The purpose of their protests was simple. If they were in fact recognized as farmers under Italian and European law, why had they not received the emergency benefits from the EU’s CAP providing financial assistance for agricultural producers in cases of environmental calamity, such as those they were currently facing as a result of the crab “invasion”?
Laura Cestari, a local council advisor of the Po Delta who went as a representative of clam farmers to the EU Parliament in Brussels, stated: “The Polesine [the administrative region for the Po Delta] is also in Europe. The Eurobureaucrats who crowd the rooms of the European Commission cannot therefore look the other way when it comes to a crustacean that is disintegrating our territory.”
In the months since the elections, all that has come out of numerous local, regional, and national meetings is a newly appointed “Extra-ordinary Commissioner for the Blue Crab Emergency” from the Italian Ministries of Environment and Agriculture. The apparent goal of this new administrative role is to devise a plan to bring the situation back to “normal.” At the level of government, the blue crab has predominantly been marketed as an appetizing new commodity2. Once again, food policy has shifted to a focus on individual consumer choices. From the Washington Post to the New York Times and the National Geographic, integrating the blue crab into the European food-system is touted as the only way to return to Italian normality, whatever ‘normality’ may mean.
This narrative only serves to further frustrate people living and working in the Po Delta, who argue that eating the blue crab — whether it is served boiled at local diners or minced by Michelin restaurants — will do little to improve their day-to-day economic reality in the lagoons. There are numbers that speak to this: So far in 2024, over 1,400 tonnes of blue crab were fished in the Po Delta alone. 74% of those crabs were not destined for human consumption, but were instead designated as an animal byproduct under European law3. This disposal of these crabs, categorized and legally treated effectively as animal “waste”, had to be financed by the clam industry which effectively further bankrupted them, costing a total of 1.4 million euros since August 2023.
Often, anthropology and the social sciences more broadly have conflated discussions of “invasive” animals and plants with anti-immigrant discourses promoted by nationalist and fascist governments (Comaroff 2017). Positing a relationship between the two is a seductive frame of analysis, especially as there is no shortage of racist, xenophobic, and violent language, policies, and actions taken against immigrants by the Italian government and its citizens. This framing, however, risks analytically conflating people, animals, and plants, metaphorically eliding the distinctions between them despite their commonalities as living beings, and flattens domains that do not “intersect in every instance” (Mastnak et al. 2014; see also Hartigan 2017). In the specific case of the blue-crab, the discursive field has tended towards a rhetoric of integration rather than exclusion4. It is in fact this very illusion — that the resolution of the problem of the blue crab is imminent through its incorporation into Europe’s agro-industrial system— that functions as a disavowal of the problem’s ‘real’ dynamics, covering over the unbearable horror of confronting the ungraspable and “relentless cascade” of death that currently ravages the Adriatic Sea, one the world’s most overfished regions (Rose 2011).
Though it certainly does mobilize the language of hate, as Radhika Govindrajan (2021) has suggested, fascism also does serious work through the register of love. This has been evident in the language used in the run up to the European election by candidates like Bartolomeo Amidei, whose words I cited in the opening of this piece. Amidei’s rhetoric is flush with deeply emotive expressions of love for the Po Delta, love for the labor of clam farmers, and the fruit of their labor (clams).
Like cellular lab-grown meat — the production of which Italy is the only country in the EU to have preemptively banned in the name of protecting “tradition”, after intense lobbying by the Italian pork industry — there is in the Po Delta another Italian product of “excellence” namely, clams, whose production is to be preserved in the name of tradition. It should be noted, perhaps with a bit of irony, that clams are a “non-native” species themselves in this case, as they were deliberately introduced in the late 20th century by enterprising biologists.
The Meloni government’s strategic use of the 2024 farmer protests and their response to the blue-crab “invasion” reflect an incoherent critique of globalization, as at the same time the government continues to support neoliberal financial expansion. The Meloni administration’s is a political position that distinctly diverges from the early 2000s “alter-globalization” movement in Italy, a movement that put forward an anti-capitalist critique of unfettered globalization led by students, farmers and trade unionists (see Klein 2023). Whether the current ruling government in Italy is “neo-fascist”, “post-fascist” or just plain-old “fascist” remains terminologically up for debate. What is certain, however, is that the neo/post/plain-old fascism of today is a highly emotive project of a capitalist ruling-class working to establish mass base support from a disenchanted agrarian stratum that has repeatedly observed underwhelming economic improvement in their everyday lives, whether their elected representatives come from the “right” or “center” (Togliatti 1976: 123).
At a clam farmer rally back in December 2023, I listened to a representative from a labor union exhort farmers to keep protesting and fighting for emergency support from the government. “We will go to Rome, even to Brussels if we must!” he shouted into the microphone. “Otherwise, we will remain with nothing but un pugno di mosche — a fist full of flies.”
In the “complicated afterlife” (Govindrajan 2018) of the most recent European elections, despite all the promises of emergency aid, mortgage freezes, and subsidies from politicians (many of whom made visits to the Delta during their political campaigns), 3,000 clam farming families have been left with only flies. Farmers have found themselves abandoned by the institutions and politicians that had promised economic relief and alternatives. “Now everyone is very quiet.” Gianluca, a clam farmer, said to me.
These most recent CAP protests have re-emphasized that farmers — like the clammers of the Po Delta — are often on the frontlines of the impacts of climate emergency, even as their labor sustains the very agricultural system which is globally one of the largest contributors to anthropogenically-driven climate change. Farmers both damage and are damaged by the system that they live and work within (Mori and Ciconte 2024).
Of all the statements that the “Extra-ordinary Commissioner” has made, I agree with one: clam farmers will have to learn to “live with” the blue crab. This proclamation rings true, however, not in the way the Commissioner intended it. The Commissioner’s invocation of living is predicated on (human) living through (crab) killing. I would argue, however, that living with the blue crab requires troubling the notion of life as necessarily in competition with another “invading” form of life (Greenhalgh-Spencer 2019: 599). Living with the blue crab instead requires abandoning the presupposition that governments might somehow resolve this crustacean invasion, as the surety of this resolve is sustained by a fantasy of technocratic environmental repair through ‘enemy’ crab eradication. ‘Living with’ requires finding a way forward for a politics of work and life that is not economically secured by a “principled” killing of certain species (Kopnina and Coghlan 2022).
Back when I had just started my research, I wish I had known to hold my breath as Matteo, a young man no more than twenty years old working for the processing and export arm of the clam industry in the Delta, opened large container doors to show me an interior filled with crates brimming with half-dead crabs. The smell was nauseating. I remember asking Matteo how managing rotting carcasses had ended up being his job. Smiling meekly at his trainers, Matteo replied, “I ask myself the same questions every day.”
These days, the stench of rotting crabs barely causes my nose to wrinkle, but what has stayed with me is the sound. When there are a couple of tonnes of crabs piled in crates and you listen closely enough you hear a low frequency sound that recalls running water. In fact, it is water. It is thousands of crabs breathing by raking over their gills the little bit of remaining water caught in their shells. It is the sound of their very slow suffocation out of water that can last for hours, which I cannot describe as anything else but the sound of a living sea.
Footnotes:
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the participants of the Animal Studies Summer Institute 2024 at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, who provided helpful feedback on an early version of this piece. In particular, I would like to extend my appreciation to Philip McKibbin and Camilla Tumidei who also generously engaged with this final version.
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