Millions of pounds worth of soft fruit and vegetables are likely to be left to rot in fields this summer because of a shortage of foreign pickers caused by the falling value of the pound and new restrictions on the number of seasonal labourers allowed to enter Britain, farmers' leaders have warned. As the harvesting season for the UK's £3.5bn horticulture industry gets under way this month, growers are fighting a losing battle to recruit enough labourers from across the European Union to pick more than 50,000 tonnes of strawberries, raspberries and other soft fruits being cultivated for the domestic market.With thousands of workers from Poland and other eastern European countries returning home to profit from their own booming economies, the reluctance to join the annual picking bonanza is being held up as evidence of Britain's dwindling attraction as a destination for migrants willing to accept low wages or undertake unskilled jobs. A mixture of rising aspirations among the once plentiful supply of foreign labour and Whitehall red tape is being blamed for a "heartbreaking" situation where thousands of tonnes of produce could go to waste.
Millions of pounds worth of soft fruit and vegetables are likely to be left to rot in fields this summer because of a shortage of foreign pickers caused by the falling value of the pound and new restrictions on the number of seasonal labourers allowed to enter Britain, farmers' leaders have warned.
As the harvesting season for the UK's £3.5bn horticulture industry gets under way this month, growers are fighting a losing battle to recruit enough labourers from across the European Union to pick more than 50,000 tonnes of strawberries, raspberries and other soft fruits being cultivated for the domestic market.
With thousands of workers from Poland and other eastern European countries returning home to profit from their own booming economies, the reluctance to join the annual picking bonanza is being held up as evidence of Britain's dwindling attraction as a destination for migrants willing to accept low wages or undertake unskilled jobs. A mixture of rising aspirations among the once plentiful supply of foreign labour and Whitehall red tape is being blamed for a "heartbreaking" situation where thousands of tonnes of produce could go to waste.
These are the issues that France needs to pay attention to when it encouraged the tescofication of its food supply industry.
And Tesco will just fly in all their soft fruit from Egypt, y'know, the place where there are food riots going on. Just like their flowers from Kenya. keep to the Fen Causeway
The PAC has always had a productivist goal (it was designed that way), and agro-business and big retail have always worked hand-in-hand in France to squeeze the smaller producers - and the laborers. In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes
And Tesco will just fly in all their soft fruit from Egypt, y'know, the place where there are food riots going on. Just like their flowers from Kenya.
Sure, if you look at a £4:00 bunch of flowers in bare terms, it's unlikely that more than £1:50 is transport. So even doubling the cost of transport won't push the flowers out of economic viability.
But doubling the cost of transport across the whole economic sphere renders huge portions of the transport industry as currently configured non-viable. People will simply cease to operate in the way they do currently because the margins become nonsensical. Large warehousers like supermarkets will cease their 800 mile round trips between sorting centres etc etc, localism will predominate. So flowers become a casualty of the entire rationale unravelling rather than being priced out of the market. keep to the Fen Causeway
And the fact that the pound is worth about 20% less than last year makes the shitty wages and conditions a lot less bearable. keep to the Fen Causeway
