By Mariachiara Ficarelli<\/a>, PhD Student, Harvard University, United States<\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cI 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,\u201d said Bartolomeo Amidei, an Italian Senator for the region of Veneto and Fratelli d\u2019Italia (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. \u201cPoliticians need to have the courage to dialogue with their citizens!\u201d The room erupted into thunderous applause.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n I began my doctoral fieldwork in August 2023, the same month that the blue crab \u201cinvasion\u201d in\u00a0 the Po Delta in the Northern Adriatic supposedly started. I had not planned to study an\u00a0 \u201cinvasive\u201d animal species, but the growing social problems posed by this crustacean made it an unexpected and unavoidable focus of research1<\/a><\/sup>. 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 \u2014 and the entire social worlds built around its farming \u2014 had been ravished by the pincers of this crustacean.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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 <\/em>\u201cinvasive\u201d 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<\/em> for the fishing industry of the Northern Adriatic.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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 \u201cinvasive\u201d species and \u201cpests\u201d 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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\u2019s political spectrum. Regardless of party affiliation, politicians have visited the Delta to pose with the blue crab\u2014 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 \u201cthreat\u201d 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 \u201cdestruction\u201d that this \u201calien predator\u201d has left in its wake. Social media posts<\/a> about politicians\u2019 visits to the Delta are proclamations of their heartfelt solidarity with the plight\u00a0 of clam farmers and fishers of the Adriatic in their battle against such an \u201cinsatiable\u201d and \u201ckiller\u201d<\/a> crustacean. The crab quickly consolidated as a mediatized icon of both horror and fascination.<\/p>\n I have come to understand the viral \u201coutbreak narrative\u201d of the blue crab by situating it within the wider environmental policy debates unfolding in Italy and Europe (Paxson 2019). One of these debates\u2019 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 \u201cfarming\u201d and the \u201cenvironment\u201d became intersecting categories in which specific notions of a desired and future \u201cEuropean environment\u201d could only be achieved in and through transforming certain practices associated with farming.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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\u2019 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 \u00a0European environmental regulation<\/a> as the primary reason for farmers\u2019 economic difficulties.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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<\/a> under Italian and European law, why had they not received the emergency benefits from the EU\u2019s 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 \u201cinvasion\u201d?\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Laura Cestari, a local council advisor of the Po Delta who went as a representative of clam\u00a0 farmers to the EU Parliament in Brussels, stated<\/a>: \u201cThe Polesine [the administrative region for\u00a0 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\u00a0 disintegrating our territory.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n In the months since the elections, all that has come out of numerous local, regional, and national meetings is a newly appointed \u201cExtra-ordinary Commissioner for the Blue Crab Emergency\u201d 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 \u201cnormal.\u201d At the level of government, the blue crab has predominantly been marketed as an appetizing new commodity2<\/a><\/sup>. Once again, food policy has shifted to a focus on individual consumer choices. From the Washington Post<\/a> to the New York Times<\/a> and the National Geographic<\/a>, integrating the blue crab into the European food-system is touted as the only way to return to Italian normality, whatever \u2018normality\u2019 may mean.\u00a0<\/p>\n This narrative only serves to further frustrate people living and working in the Po Delta, who argue that eating the blue crab \u2014 <\/em>whether it is served boiled at local diners or minced by Michelin restaurants \u2014 <\/em>will do little to improve their day-to-day economic reality in the lagoons.\u00a0 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<\/a><\/sup>. This disposal of these crabs, categorized and legally treated effectively as animal \u201cwaste\u201d, had to be financed by the clam industry which effectively further bankrupted them, costing a total of 1.4 million euros since August 2023.\u00a0<\/p>\n Often, anthropology and the social sciences more broadly have conflated discussions of \u201cinvasive\u201d 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 \u201cintersect in every instance\u201d (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<\/a><\/sup>.\u00a0 It is in fact this very illusion \u2014 <\/em>that the resolution of the problem of the blue crab is imminent through its incorporation into Europe\u2019s agro-industrial system\u2014 <\/em>that functions as a disavowal of the problem\u2019s \u2018real\u2019 dynamics, covering over the unbearable horror of confronting the ungraspable and \u201crelentless cascade\u201d of death that currently ravages the Adriatic Sea, one the world\u2019s most overfished regions (Rose 2011).<\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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).\u00a0<\/p>\n Like cellular lab-grown meat\u00a0 \u2014<\/em> the production of which Italy is the only country in the EU to have preemptively banned<\/a> in the name of protecting \u201ctradition\u201d, after intense lobbying by the Italian pork industry\u00a0 \u2014<\/em> there is in the Po Delta another Italian product of \u201cexcellence\u201d\u00a0 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 \u201cnon-native\u201d species themselves in this case, as they were deliberately introduced in the late 20th<\/sup> century by enterprising biologists.<\/p>\n The Meloni government\u2019s strategic use of the 2024 farmer protests and their response to the blue-crab \u201cinvasion\u201d reflect an incoherent critique of globalization, as at the same time the government continues to support neoliberal financial expansion. The Meloni administration\u2019s is a political position that distinctly diverges from the early 2000s \u201calter-globalization\u201d 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 \u201cneo-fascist\u201d, \u201cpost-fascist\u201d or just plain-old \u201cfascist\u201d 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 \u201cright\u201d or \u201ccenter\u201d (Togliatti 1976: 123).\u00a0<\/p>\n 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. \u201cWe will go to Rome, even to Brussels if we must!\u201d he shouted into the microphone. \u201cOtherwise, we will remain with nothing but un pugno di mosche \u2014 <\/em>a fist full of flies.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n In the \u201ccomplicated afterlife\u201d (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. \u201cNow everyone is very quiet.\u201d Gianluca, a clam farmer, said to me.<\/p>\n These most recent CAP protests have re-emphasized that farmers \u2014 <\/em>like the clammers of the\u00a0 Po Delta \u2014 <\/em>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\u00a0 anthropogenically-driven climate change. Farmers both damage and are damaged by the\u00a0 system that they live and work within (Mori and Ciconte 2024).\u00a0<\/p>\n Of all the statements that the \u201cExtra-ordinary Commissioner\u201d has made, I agree with one: clam\u00a0 farmers will <\/em>have to learn to \u201clive with\u201d the blue crab<\/a>. This proclamation rings true, however, not in the way the Commissioner intended it. The Commissioner\u2019s 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 \u201cinvading\u201d 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 \u2018enemy\u2019 crab eradication. \u2018Living with\u2019 requires finding a way forward for a politics of work and life that is not economically secured by a \u201cprincipled\u201d killing of certain species (Kopnina and Coghlan 2022).<\/p>\n Back when I had just started my research, I wish I had known to hold my breath as Matteo, a\u00a0 young man no more than twenty years old working for the processing and export arm of the\u00a0 clam industry in the Delta, opened large container doors to show me an interior filled with crates\u00a0 brimming with half-dead crabs. The smell was nauseating. I remember asking Matteo how\u00a0 managing rotting carcasses had ended up being his job. Smiling meekly at his trainers, Matteo\u00a0 replied, \u201cI ask myself the same questions every day.\u201d<\/p>\n These days, the stench of rotting crabs barely causes my nose to wrinkle, but what has stayed\u00a0 with me is the sound. When there are a couple of tonnes of crabs piled in crates and you listen\u00a0 closely enough you hear a low frequency sound that recalls running water. In fact, it is water. It\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n Footnotes:<\/strong><\/p>\n Acknowledgements\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n I would like to thank the participants of the Animal Studies Summer Institute 2024 at the\u00a0 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n References<\/strong><\/p>\n Besky, Sarah, and Alex Blanchette, eds. How Nature Works: Rethinking Labor on a Troubled\u00a0 Planet<\/em>. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2019.\u00a0<\/p>\n Ciconte, Fabio, and Giovanni Mori. L\u2019impatto Ambientale e Sociale Della Filiera Del Cibo, Con Fabio Ciconte<\/em>, 2024.\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n Comaroff, Jean. \u201cInvasive Aliens: The Late-Modern Politics of Species Being.\u201d Social Research<\/em> 84 (April 1, 2017): 29\u201352.\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n Crosby, Alfred W. W. Ecological Imperialism 2ed: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900<\/em>. 2nd edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.<\/p>\n Devlieger, Lionel. \u201cThe Crab at the End of the World.\u201d Anthropocenes \u2013 Human, Inhuman, Posthuman<\/em> 4, no. 1 (October 11, 2023).\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n Govindrajan, Radhika. \u201cElectoral Ripples: The Social Life of Lies and Mistrust in an Indian Village Election.\u201d HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory<\/em> 8, no. 1\u20132 (March 2018): 129\u201343.\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n \u2014\u2014\u2014. \u201cLabors of Love: On the Political Economies and Ethics of Bovine Politics in Himalayan India.\u201d Cultural Anthropology<\/em> 36, no. 2 (May 11, 2021): 193\u2013221.\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n Greenhalgh-Spencer, Heather. \u201cThe \u2018Discourse of Invasive Species\u2019: Another Consideration for the Rebel Teacher.\u201d Philosophy of Education<\/em> 73 (2017): 598\u2013602.\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n Hartigan, John. Care of the Species: Races of Corn and the Science of Plant Biodiversity<\/em>. Minneapolis: Univ of Minnesota Pr, 2017.<\/p>\n Klein, Naomi. Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World<\/em>. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023.<\/p>\n Kopnina, Helen, and Simon Coghlan. \u201cInvasion Biology and Its Discontents.\u201d Visions for Sustainability<\/em>, April 29, 2022, 6512, 1-28.<\/p>\n Mastnak, Tomaz, Julia Elyachar, and Tom Boellstorff. \u201cBotanical Decolonization: Rethinking Native Plants.\u201d Environment and Planning D: Society and Space<\/em> 32, no. 2 (April 2014): 363\u201380.\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n Moore, Amelia. \u201cTHE AQUATIC INVADERS: Marine Management Figuring Fishermen, Fisheries, and Lionfish in The Bahamas.\u201d Cultural Anthropology<\/em> 27, no. 4 (November 2012): 667\u201388.<\/p>\n Paxson, Heather. \u201c\u2018Don\u2019t Pack a Pest\u2019: Parts, Wholes, and the Porosity of Food Borders.\u201d Food, Culture & Society<\/em>, October 20, 2019.\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n Rose, Deborah Bird. Wild Dog Dreaming: Love and Extinction<\/em>. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2011.<\/p>\n Scotellaro, Federica. \u201cGranchio blu: uno studio di Ca\u2019 Foscari nelle lagune di Venezia e Chioggia.\u201d Universit\u00e0 Ca\u2019 Foscari Venezia, July 28, 2023. https:\/\/www.unive.it\/pag\/14024\/?tx_news_pi1%5Bnews%5D=14848&cHash=1be6177840dbb3d546f56aea6326b463<\/a>.<\/p>\n Tamburini, Elena. \u201cThe Blue Treasure: Comprehensive Biorefinery of Blue Crab (Callinectes Sapidus).\u201d Foods (Basel, Switzerland)<\/em> 13, no. 13 (June 26, 2024): 2018.\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n Togliatti, Palmiro. Lectures on Fascism<\/em>. 1st ed. New York: International Publishers, 1976.<\/p>\n Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. \u201cInvasion Blowback and Other Tales of the Anthropocene: An Afterword.\u201d Anthropocenes \u2013 Human, Inhuman, Posthuman<\/em> 4, no. 1 (October 11, 2023).\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/aesengagement.wordpress.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/12\/image.jpeg?w=1024\")
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