Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) on Friday slammed Italy for the ''terrifying living conditions'' of immigrants doing seasonal farm work in the south of the country.
MSF Calabria coordinator Cristina Falconi said immigrants working as orange pickers are forced to live in ''inhumane conditions, unworthy of a G8 country'' while working 12-hour days for which they receive ''unacceptable salaries''.
In Gioia Tauro in Calabria, MSF discovered around 1,500 workers sleeping on cardboard on the floors of abandoned factories with no electricity, water or electricity, she said.
''These are young people who are healthy when they arrive in Italy but after six months they get ill,'' she said.
''Little protection from the cold together with cooking and sleeping in unaired spaces have a significant influence on the onset of respiratory disease, while the difficult living and working conditions bring on stomach, bone and muscle problems,'' she said.
MSF distributed 1,500 emergency kits containing sleeping bags, soap, toothbrushes and toothpaste in order to help immigrants deal with the ''unacceptable conditions'', she added.
MSF mission head Antonio Virgilio said both Puglia and Calabria had signed agreements to fund a humanitarian aid plan for the immigrants, but Calabria had yet to put the measures into action.
''The very least we can expect of a country like Italy is to respect the minimum international reception standards,'' he said, citing a United Nations rule for refugee camps requiring at least one toilet for every 20 people.
MSF called on the Calabrian authorities to install chemical toilets, showers and drinking water cisterns for the immigrants, most of whom have entered Italy illegally.
The plight of immigrant workers hit the headlines in 2006, when news weekly L'Espresso published an article by journalist Fabrizio Gatti, who posed as immigrant crop picker on farms around Puglia.
Gatti described conditions in which workers were beaten, threatened and forced to toil long hours with almost no breaks, food or water.
He said a common tactic employed by their bosses was to call in the police on pay day so that the immigrants would flee for fear of being arrested or deported.
In the wake of the report, the centre-left government at the time began considering proposals to crack down on the maltreatment of crop-pickers, recognising that the sanctions faced by illegal immigrants left them vulnerable to exploitation.
Puglia President Nichi Vendola meanwhile pledged to put an end to what he described as ''a modern form of slavery''.
A government committee tasked with combating forms of immigrant exploitation at the time said victims were usually ''foreigners from Eastern Europe, as well as a very small percentage of Africans and Asians''.
