A campaign to oblige farmworkers, including Muslims observing the Ramadan fast, to drink water during the most torrid time of the day, has sparked controversy in the northern Italian city of Mantua, news reports said Friday, according to dpa. The provision is contained in a document drafted ahead of the harvest season and aimed at safeguarding workers' health, according to its authors, labour unions and associations representing landowners. Hundreds of mostly casual labourers, many of them Muslim immigrants from North Africa, are employed to pick vegetables and fruit, including tomatoes, watermelon and cantaloupe, grown in the fertile Po River valley around Mantua. The document, which is to be distributed on local farms, stresses the risk of dehydration faced by those toiling in the fields in "hot and humid" conditions, especially Muslim workers who during the holy month of Ramadan don't eat or drink during daylight hours. Employers are urged to suspend or, in cases of continued refusal, to fire workers who refuse the intake of water, a point which has drawn condemnation from Islamic community representatives. "Nobody can force a person to break their fast," said a Muslim spokesman in Mantua, Ben Mansour, noting that under Italian law no individual is obliged to drink water against their will. But the head of the Confagricoltura agricultural producers body in the city, Daniele Sfulcini, has defended the drinking provision, noting that health authorities hold "land owners responsible for the health of their workers". "The prospect of firing people can sound like a provocation, but it serves to shift responsibility on the person who refuses to drink," Sfulcini told the daily La Stampa. During Ramadan, which this year is scheduled to begin on August 21, the faithful refrain from eating, drinking, sex and smoking from dawn until sunset.
