Fruit and vegetables are being left to rot in England as Brexit deters migrants from taking up picking jobs.
Farmers have told Euronews that restrictions to freedom of movement have had a "devastating" impact.
Brexit -- the effects of which kicked-in at the start of the year -- means hiring migrant pickers from eastern Europe is now much harder.
Barfoots of Botley, a farming company based on England's south coast near Bognor Regis, said 750,000 courgettes were being left to rot.
They say that's because they can’t get the staff and if the situation continues it will force them to make difficult decisions about their future.
“Restricting free movement has had a devasting impact," said managing director Julian Marks. "But not just on agriculture and horticulture – on pretty much every sector where people from abroad have been working in those sectors for years and now. They’re going home."
Marks said as a consequence the firm is struggling to fulfil the demands of the supermarkets. He thinks it's inevitable either shelves will be left empty or the likes of Sainsbury's and Tescos will turn to EU imports to fill the gaps.
He added it was "tragic" and "demoralising" to see so many vegetables go to waste, saying the situation is worse than expected.
It's a sentiment echoed by Mark Knight, technical crops manager at Tangmere Airfield Nurseries, the largest farm of its kind in the UK. He told Euronews the extent to which migrants had stayed away had taken him by surprise.
The farm's general manager, Gerrard Vonk, said they had relied on seasonal pickers from Eastern Europe for 33 years.
But since Brexit, there are "more barriers, more red tape and much more difficulty to actually come and work over here."
Vonk said he had 72 fewer workers than last year and, as a consequence of the shortages, crops are being left to over-ripen rather than be harvested.
Both Knight and Vonk think the root cause is Brexit, rather than COVID-related travel restrictions. They say Europeans do not feel at home in the UK and they are urging the government to launch a PR campaign to invite them to return.
Boris Johnson's government has launched a PR drive -- but that was last year and aimed at getting Britons to help harvest crops.
Called Pick for Britain, it was aimed at encouraging those left unemployed by the pandemic to fill the gap left by migrant workers.
But one agency, Pro-Force, said of the 450 UK-based workers it placed under the scheme, just 4 per cent were still in their roles by the end of the season.
"Common feedback from the British nationals placed by Pro-Force was that many of them wanted to 'do their bit' at time of national crisis but did not see this as a long term, viable option to provide the labour the industry needs in 2021 and beyond," said James Mallick from Pro-Force in written evidence to a parliamentary committee.
Euronews contacted the UK government to respond to criticism in this article but had not received a response by the time of publication.
eleleleu on July 25th, 2021 at 18:39 UTC »
A perspective of someone from the Eastern block. Nobody went to UK to pick fruit and veg thinking it was some dream job. People usually did it short term to save money up for the expenses they would usually need to save up much longer for. Like build a house. Buy a new car. Students earning money for vacations and their own expenses. People who wanted to stay long-term did not go to pick fruit in Britain. They went as plumbers, doctors, engineers, mechanics, beauticians etc. They went to college.
Now, with all the restrictions (not mentioning covid) - why would you go for all the British paperwork when the same type of job awaits in Netherlands, Belgium, Germany or Sweden? And you only need an ID and some form of employment agreement. It's an easy conclusion.
postvolta on July 25th, 2021 at 17:19 UTC »
Unlike most people, I've picked fruit. It fucking sucks and it is a dead-end job. I picked in Australia. Here's some of the many reasons it sucks:
Paid by the kilo based on the 'average' picking speed. It sounds fair and sounds like a deterrent for not fucking off, but what it ends up doing is if one person is experienced and the other is inexperienced, despite working just as 'hard' the person who is inexperienced earns less than minimum wage. I was not very good, and I got paid absolutely fuck all compared to my wife who, by comparison, picked it up really quickly. Following on from previous point, from my understanding you have to pick all the ripe fruit off the trees even if it's not good enough to package, because otherwise the tree will stop bearing fruit and the unripe fruit won't ripen. They called it cleaning the trees. You have to get the pain in the arse to pick fruit deep in the bushes/trees as well as the easy to pick fruit at the front. The experienced pickers didn't bother and knew how to avoid management, and management would have others go back and clean the stuff that hadn't been picked properly, so you have to go and spend twice as long picking half the fruit because it's a pain in the arse to pick, while someone else just flew past picking twice as much in half the time by grabbing the good stuff right at the front. It's very physically demanding - often you've got heavy and poorly-designed/cheaply made equipment that hangs awkwardly and after a full day your hands and back are super sore. Now add in other hazards (snakes, spiders, heatstroke, dehydration, and further north saltwater crocs) and you've got an actual dangerous job on your hands The local facilities are appalling and massively overpriced - because a lot of the work is rural they have to provide accommodation for staff, but because the staff are seasonal and foreign and usually pretty desperate they know they can offer little more than a hole in the ground to shit in and a hosepipe for a shower. Some of my favourites: metal shed shower cubicles filled with red-back and huntsman spiders, filthy toilets with no toilet seats/toilet paper/soap/broken taps, one of the owners of the facilities nearly ran me off the road and threatened me when I told him how filthy his place was, one place charged me 80% of my wages to stay there ($625 earned per week: $550 for accommodation/rent/bills). On one farm there were a few carcasses of wallabies that had got trapped in the area and had died... they weren't removed the entire time I worked there. The smell of decaying carcasses is pretty fucking intense. It's not full time - usually, unless you're in polytunnels (plastic-covered tunnels) you may not actually work due to weather - for example, did it rain? Can't work. Was it clear overnight and thus frosty? Can't work. Too hot? Can't work. If you pick the fruit if it's saturated or too hot it will ruin it and so you can't work. We stayed at one place for 3 weeks and only managed 9 days of work, but had to pay accommodation the whole time. At a cherry farm we worked at, they actually dried the cherry trees with a helicopter. Staff, more often than not, treat you like shit - one place the supervisor staff were all local kids/friends of the owner's daughter. The owner's daughter was a fat little cunt, and would take great pleasure in docking you or telling you to go back if the box of cherries wasn't quite filled to the top. Her friends who were also supervisors would mock the pickers and sometimes were even racist to some of the African pickers. Whoever thought putting racist little 16 year old cunts in charge of immigrant labour is fucking stupid. It's filthy. I cannot express this enough: wash your produce. Fruit picked up out of the mud, picked while someone's smoking, picked after someone took a shit and didn't wash their hands because it's not a part of their culture. And then when it's packaged in the warehouse it's not washed either.I could go on. Either the employees are paid more and the industry is subsidised by the government as an 'essential' industry, the industry is nationalised and the staff are paid a living wage and provided with appropriate amenities, staff are paid more and as such the cost of produce increases, or nothing changes and we don't have any fresh produce.
Something has got to give, the industry is fucking depraved.
Edit: lots of comments and can't reply to them all. Seems that the people who are good and had good jobs got paid well and enjoyed it. Glad to hear it. Sorry for the 'culture'/poop comment, I didn't engage my brain and have work to do on my prejudices. Have a nice evening folks and remember: wash your produce before consumption.
Boletusrubra on July 25th, 2021 at 14:41 UTC »
This is what happens when you have a sector that makes up about 0.5% of the GdP having its major source of labour withdrawn. What did they expect? People to pivot from their service industry (70% of gdp) to hard manual labour?