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Food miles and fruit pickers

10
06
07

Food miles and fruit pickers

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A quite bonkers situation is highlighted today:

Migrant cap 'will hit fruit crop':

Thousands of pounds worth of strawberries could be lost

Much of this year's strawberry crop will not be harvested because of a cap on seasonal workers entering the UK, the National Farmers' Union has warned.
The NFU says the cap, which limits the number of non-EU citizens entering the country, is causing a shortage of fruit-pickers.

Farmers are calling for the government to raise the cap from its current limit of just over 16,000.

The Home Office says farms should recruit from closer to home.

Farmers say they have found it increasingly difficult to recruit seasonal workers since the expansion of the EU in 2004, which gave membership to countries including Poland.

So, by preventing the free movement of people, we increase the need to move goods around the world that could be just as well produced at home. We'll presumably have to see more Spanish strawberries in the shops because we won't allow people to come and pick English ones. And yet as I write here from my hall of residence flat, I hear our domestic staff bustling about getting ready to welcome hundreds of youngsters from overseas to learn a bit of English for a few weeks, which will no doubt be replicated at universities up and down the country.

Bonkers.

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Comments

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Tom Papworth (not verified) on June 10, 2007 - 13:45.
The farmers have nothing to fear, Jock. I'm sure we'll find plenty more in the Common Agricultural Fund to compensate them for the fact that labour is too expensive to make their crops profitable as a result of our limiting the number of farm workers who would happily come and pick the crops cheaply. As you say, bonkers.
Jock's picture
Submitted by Jock on June 10, 2007 - 14:03.
I don't get the impression that labour is too expensive. They say they are happily paying more than minimum wage and happily paying 20-25% more than agricultural minimums for the short term work. It's about permits. The A8 countries' workers will not come for such low grade work and John Reid has restricted the SAWS nation permits because he wants them to include in the Romanian/Bulgarian workers' quotas even though they now have the right to travel anywhere in the EU to work at whatever they want. But you're right, I suspect the farmers will be okay. It's us who will end up with tasteless forced-grown overseas fruit transported further than necessary. Remember when it was all the rage for UK soon to be students to pick grapes in France for next to nothing!
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