Resistant More-Than-human Co-Habitations in Italy’s Deshi Sobji Farms
Elisa T. Bertuzzo
Sobji cultivation in Pontine Plain, Italy (1)
Through research on vegetable seeds carried along, planted, and cultivated by Bangladeshi migrants in Italy, I am learning about the ways in which co-mobile humans and plants intra-relating in new ecologies manage to configure co-habitable spaces. While “habitation” generally describes the practices through which human beings identify, appropriate, and shape everyday dwelling spaces, the use of the term “co-habitation” in the context of this essay speaks to an ongoing shift of focus in the social sciences. As the discipline progressively incorporates insights that human as well as nonhuman individuals “emerge through and as part of their entangled intra-relating,” or intra-action (Barad, 2007, p. iv), what used to be defined as habitation is revealed as co-habitation, an essentially more-than-human affair. The following ethnographic account of fieldwork within Bangladeshi communities in Italy depicts how knowledges hybridise along with migration and climate change, and thereby nurture resilient co-habitations. The case study also substantiates a conceptualisation of human-plant intra-actions as instances of resistance
Fruits of More-Than-Human Migration
The Bangladeshi community today represents one of Italy’s largest non-EU resident communities (Istat, 2025). The official count of 192,000 current residents appears to be significantly underreported, as more Bangladeshi-run grocery shops, barbers, tailors, money transfer outlets, prayer rooms, and restaurants set up across the country, from Venice in the north to Palermo in the south. Undocumented residence and “illegal” immigration are at a high, both due to stricter asylum procedures, routinised rejections and deportations, as well as the prioritising of seasonal labour visas in the EU zone (De Genova, 2017), and as a consequence of geopolitical conflicts, wars, and unequal development undermining livelihoods in the majority world.
The deshi sobji, “vegetables of the native place” (from the Bengali words “desh” meaning country, and “sobji” meaning vegetables), started to appear on balconies and in urban niches across Italy around 20 years ago. Initially planted by Bangladeshi residents in response to the high prices and poor taste of vegetables imported via the UK or cultivated in Dutch greenhouses (Siddique, 2020), the crops appeared fit for the climate and soil, and prospered. Encouraged by the high demand within the community and from other Asian consumers, some of these early growers moved to larger-scale production, leasing fields and experimenting with greater quantities and varieties of seeds brought from Bangladesh. They became Italy’s first generation of independent migrant farmers, controlling a supply chain that has been distributing vegetables such as karala (bitter gourd), chichinga (snake gourd), lau (bottle gourd), sag (spinach/edible leaves), methi (fenugreek), coriander, and green chilli across Central Europe for now over a decade (Bertuzzo 2025a).
When my fieldwork began in 2021, everyday life was governed by anti-COVID-19 measures. While major goods’ supply chains faced shortages as a consequence of these restrictions, I found the groceries and vegetable stands run by Bangladeshi entrepreneurs in localities as diverse as Venice’s industrial hinterland Mestre, cities like Bologna, Rome and Naples, the weekly market of county town Latina (Central Italy), and Palermo in Sicily, to be consistently well stocked. Many of these entrepreneurs reported that Italian clients, usually reluctant to buy vegetables they did not know, had recently begun purchasing sag, a vegetable resembling spinach or chard. For Anwar, his and other “Bangla” shops were rather competitive and had already partly replaced other local grocery shops thanks to their reliable supplies and affordable prices. In his opinion, the development also held promise for more varied and healthier diets. “When [Italian] customers ask me how to cook sag, I explain and also tell them, say, that karala purifies the liver and is good against diabetes, as it keeps the sugar levels low. Sooner or later, I’ll convince someone!”
I discovered that Anwar was also a cultivator only when I joined Sayed, a Bangladeshi wholesale dealer I befriended in Rome, on his routine trip to buy sobji and deliver food rations for the workers at Anwar’s farm in the Pontine Plain region. Anwar had a three-year lease on the property, which extended over 14 hectares, and a majority of his labourers held regular work visas. Although this sufficed for the police, he and other Bangladeshi farmers had become wary of visitors after the sudden confiscations of Chinese-farmed gardens in Tuscany (Firenze Today, 2020). The “secrecy” of the sobji farms has remained one of the main challenges of conducting research on the topic (and is the reason for keeping the locations of those I have visited undisclosed in this essay), even though the number of these farms spread across the Italian territory is likely high. In the course of fieldwork, I learnt that aside from larger leased properties of 14-16 hectares employing up to 20 labourers, there are many smaller ones of just 1-2 hectares, generally catering to shops on a regional scale. The bigger farms, producing for national distribution as well as export to France, Switzerland, Austria, and Germany, have had considerable success. The 2020 income of two Bangladeshi partners who ran a 14-hectare farm in North Italy, for example, amounted to 500,000€, which for a relatively small-scale farm is considered to be a high income.
Grocery shop displaying deshi sobji in Rome
The Work of Resistance
The confiscations of gardens farmed by Chinese migrants were, on the one hand, a mere manifestation of the resentment and racist attacks experienced by the Chinese community since the outbreak of the coronavirus (Muzi, 2020; Pofi & Leung, 2021). On the other hand, they mirrored the anxiety about biological invasion that the spread of the virus fomented worldwide (Davino & Villani, 2021; Nuñez et al., 2020). The narrative of the alien vegetables threatening biodiversity circulated in public discourse and, according to several human rights activists and environmentalists I interviewed, was often flanked by that of the alien crops undermining Italy’s “authentic landscape.” Interestingly, these narratives did not intersect with a concurrent narrative, which portrayed native Italian farmers cultivating mango, avocado, Thai eggplant, or papaya as pioneers of climate change adaptation, and the exotic crops as welcome newcomers and heralds of prosperity (Agenzia Nova, 2022). Labelling the nontraditional practice attended by native farmers as innovative, and that introduced by migrant farmers as dangerous, is not a neutral act. Whether and which knowledges are socially accepted depends on cultural representations, and similar double standards are oftentimes revealing of mainstream representations of immigration and immigrants, which are imbued with xenophobia, racism, and inherent Eurocentrism (Pinelli & Giuliani, 2021).
The life-sustaining knowledges and innovative practices that the migrant farmers and their co-mobile seeds offer challenge and destabilise these representations. First of all, the sobji imported from Asia or farmed in greenhouses come with higher CO2 emissions than the locally cultivated sobji. Apart from the transportation emissions, greenhouses often require a higher input of materials and maintenance. In this sense, Italy’s sobji farms speak to initiatives promoting relocalisation and “eating local” to counter the high carbon footprint, inherent extractivism, and exposure to supply shocks of global food systems (Mindegaard, 2020). In addition, the Bangladeshi farms are reactivating countrysides concerned with the negative effects of decades-long emigration and agricultural land abandonment, a result of demographic decline, urban sprawl, land speculation, flawed agricultural policies, as well as the ever-higher costs of cultivation caused by rain scarcity, soil exhaustion, and the dependency on multinationals for pesticides, fertilisers, and seeds (Baldwin & Casalini, 2021; DG AGRI, 2025; Mela et al., 2016).
Italy’s agricultural sector has traditionally been controlled by agribusiness firms, small and medium landowners, as well as mafia-like networks called caporalato (Sagnet & Palmisano, 2015). For the past two decades, scholars speak of a “refugeeisation of agricultural labour” (Dines & Rigo, 2015), as seasonal migrant workers from European countries are replaced with much more exploitable sans-papiers and refugees (Mezzadra & Heynen, 2013). The emergence of sobji farming is reshaping this exploitative structure. Amid the daily discrimination and racism experienced by migrants in Italy (Balmer, 2022), the actions of these lobby-less first-generation Bangladeshi migrants—refusing to submit to local power structures, venturing into often openly hostile rural areas, connecting with fellow farmers, getting access to land, and navigating institutions—constitute a valid form of resistant collective action (Bertuzzo, 2025).
While reserving the term “resistance” for human organising seems in order vis-à-vis the formidable problems created through human extractivism and colonialism, I contend that the sobji themselves are resistant and that migrants and sobji resist in concert. The sobji resist by bypassing and frustrating human pretensions of control, embodied in policies and actions targeting “invasive” species—from the EU “plant passports” and QR codes for tracking in use since 2019 to the removal of “alien” vegetable gardens mentioned above—which feature remarkable parallels with the EU’s militarised fear of human immigration (Laparle, 2024; Tazzioli & De Genova, 2023). An incredible power of collective adaptability and resistance is manifest in the adaptation of the sobji, assisted by farmers, to a terrain, Italy, that is not only geologically but also climatically very different from the terrain from which they have been brought. Once we consider the millennial history of plant movement and evolution-by-adaptation to changing climates and environments, it appears that sobji also resist Eurocentric periodization: not least the year 1492, known as the year of the Columbian Exchange, which has long been used to demarcate “native” and “alien” species in Italy, as elsewhere (Keulartz & van der Weele, 2008). Ultimately, these co-mobile humans and plants resist hegemonic, European narratives of progress and its agents, by contrasting the better-known stories of crops such as maize, potatoes, or tomatoes introduced from the Americas by colonial explorers and naturalists, with those of karala, chichinga, or sag brought by Bangladeshi migrants in today’s post-colonial setting.
kulmi saak
Diversifying Climate Knowledges
In the course of my research, confronting the complex of “plant invasion,” I found a deep flaw in the widespread anxiety that introduced crops will turn invasive. As domesticated plants, crops are not adaptable enough to pose serious risks of “invasion.” Once brought to new ecologies, they may cross-pollinate with local plants and this diversification and evolution is the primary way they may “unsettle” the species (Kloppenburg, 2004). As the potential outcomes are infinite and impossible to model, human knowledges are challenged, and plant knowledges come to the forefront (Pollan, 2013). This must not be seen as an opposition: on the ground, the norm is rather human-plant cooperation, or even co-labouring (Ernwein et al., 2022), and a diversification of knowledges is its fruitful and open-ended outcome. The introduction of kulmi sag (water spinach) into Italy by Bangladeshi farmers provides a good example of how human-plant cooperation and the diversification of knowledge occur in practice. Kulmi sag is an edible plant that thrives spontaneously in and by the water bodies formed by the seasonal rains in Monsoon Asia—between June and September in Bangladesh. Nowadays, at many sobji farms in Italy, the seasonal delicacy grows in orderly lines throughout the year. As most fields come equipped with irrigation pipes, several Bangladeshi farmers have repurposed them to “recreate” monsoon conditions, that is, continual moisture (Figure 3).
If, from a human perspective, the combination of found technologies and inventiveness created a hybrid farming practice, looked at from a more-than-human perspective the adaptive capability of kulmi sag stands out. When I speak of a diversification of climate knowledges fostered by human-plant co-mobilities, I do not merely mean the enriching of local knowledges through migrants’ knowledges about foreign vegetables and their cultivation: which are fit for which soils, which may adapt to dire weather conditions, among other questions. I am also suggesting that diversification occurs as the knowledges of plants evolve. It is likely that so far, the foreign sobji have been advantaged by the absence of “natural enemies” in Italy: according to the farmers, they require a fraction of the usual quantities of pesticides needed in Bangladesh. But plants have been applying and refining their own climate knowledges (Jones & Cloke, 2002) by adapting to different latitudes and navigating climatic changes for millennia before Homo sapiens sapiens, and the sobji are evidently doing the same now, with and without human assistance. In the case of kulmi sag, growing throughout the year (and not only seasonally) certainly increases its chances of evolution, whether by adaptation or cross-pollination.
Hybrid Knowledges as Mediators of Resilient Co-Habitations
In adapting, improving, and remixing farming knowledges into practices that continue to hybridise and evolve, the sobji farmers do not see themselves as lone pioneers or competitors. I found that information about successes, and requests for help with challenges linked to cultivation and the general management of the farms, are readily shared through countrywide networks, via phone, and through social media. In other words, like the silent and dispersed daily resistance to racism and xenophobia discussed above, cultivating vegetables in unfamiliar landscapes is understood to be a collective effort. Such an approach makes all the more sense given that with climate change, these landscapes are rapidly transforming and what is viable today might not be tomorrow (Baldwin & Casalini, 2021; Lazoglou et al., 2024). However, my research suggests that rather than being hurriedly dismissed—or banned as threats to biodiversity—sobji should be appreciated and studied as climate-resilient crops. All Bangladeshi growers I talked to mentioned the uncertain availability of groundwater and the recurrence of damaging floods as potential or actual constraints, but remarked that the majority of the sobji currently cultivated in Italy withstand both wetness and water scarcity.
On a planet that is turning uninhabitable, which knowledges and practices can better support co-habitation? In this essay, I tackled this question by drawing on experiences gathered following co-mobile humans and plants on routes shaped by capitalist expulsion and ecological devastation, which over the past years have fundamentally changed my understanding of climate knowledges. If agricultural practices which emerge from experiences of migration can improve dietary diversity and foster climate resilience, the collaborative nature of these practices suggests that the intra-actions inaugurated at the sobji farms, by humans and plants alike, are currently facilitating a diversification of climate knowledges with benefits for co-habitation. This speaks to scholarship showing how climate change and migration can foster transformative conjunctures (Tsing et al., 2018). To close on a methodological note, one takeaway from doing research with a posthuman perspective is that this demands an understanding of the simultaneity and entangledness of the temporalities of human and nonhuman processes (Bastian, 2009). The case study I presented, evidencing the impossibility of predicting the paths of the sobji’s future adaptations and cross-pollinations, highlights the necessity of studying socio-ecological phenomena by combining more-than-human temporal scales, and accepting that human knowledges are not exhaustive, but coexist with many others.
All names have been changed.