[caption id="attachment_1887" align="alignleft" width="1024"] A foreign seasonal worker in a field near Foggia, in Puglia | Photo: ARCHIVE/ANSA[/caption] In order to "provide water" for inhabitants, a delegation of migrant labourers who stay in a shantytown between Cerignola and Stornarella, close to the Puglian city of Foggia, visited the municipality of Stornarella. Numerous hundred migrants live in the "Tre titoli" shantytown, where water shortages are a persistent issue. It has been covered intermittently since 2018. A group of migrant labourers who reside in "Tre titoli" went to the Stornarella town hall on Thursday, August 31, to request that the camp be "provided with water." The slum is situated close to Foggia in the countryside between Cerignola and Stornarella. It is populated by several hundred immigrants who work in the nearby fields, with the summer months seeing an increase to about 1,000 people. They are primarily from Ghana.

Migrants must walk for kilometres to get water

'Tre titoli' gets water through tanker trucks that reach Cerignola twice a week, which fill up tanks for migrants. However, the area of the shantytown that is territorially part of the municipality of Stornarella allegedly doesn't get any water, activists have denounced. "Water provision is the responsibility of municipalities that, in addition to filling up all tanks in front of abandoned farmhouses" inhabited by migrants, "are also responsible for their cleanliness and upkeep, to prevent potential bacterial infections," said activists from the local network Campagne in lotta defending farmworkers' rights, who are following the case. "All this, however, only occurs, in part, in the portion of the territory administered by the municipality of Cerignola. Only in part because, according to the ghetto's residents, the tanks are filled up but never cleaned or changed," the activists denounced. The problem, according to information gathered by the activists, "concerns those living in the municipality of Stornarella, where migrants are forced to get (water) from farmhouses in the area of Cerignola, after walking for several kilometres, while others have bought tanks with their own money." The mayor of Stornarella, Massimo Colia, contacted by ANSA, said he was committed to solving the problem very quickly.