Picking fruit by hand is low-paid, seasonal and backbreaking work that few Britons want to do
are the quintessential taste of the British summer. But getting British fruit to market depends on foreign labour. In recent years many of the migrants who came to Britain to pick strawberries and other crops were from Ukraine and Russia. This year, most will stay away.
Just over 60% of all the food eaten in Britain is produced on British farms. Nearly all of the berries eaten between May and October are home-grown. Picking fruit by hand is low-paid, seasonal and backbreaking work that. So farmers rely on imported labour to harvest their crops. After 1945 foreign workers, mostly students, were issued visas under the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Scheme .
Four firms are licensed to recruit foreign workers for British farms. One of them, AG Recruitment, planned this year to allocate half of its allotted 7,500 visas to Ukrainians, and one-third to Russians. But since the Russian invasion most Ukrainian men have been forbidden to leave the country. British visa-application centres in Ukraine also closed, stopping women from applying for seasonal-worker visas.
To replace Ukrainian and Russian workers, recruiters have turned again to Bulgarians and Romanians as well as Macedonians and workers from central Asia. Yet they are struggling to meet their quotas: AG Recruitment still needs 1,000 workers for June. And many of this season’s crop of pickers are first-timers who need training. British Summer Fruits, an industry lobbyist, estimates that newcomers are 30% less productive than returnees.
A shortage of pickers means fruit is left to rot in fields. Nearly 8,000 tonnes of berries, worth £36.5m , were wasted in 2021. The minimum wage paid to fruit-pickers rose in April, and other production costs are rising, too. Faced with empty shelves or expensive punnets, Brits might spare a thought for those prevented from filling them.
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