LONDON — You know you have worries when the future king is warning about food security. Prince Charles this week implored workers furloughed by the pandemic to get out into the fields and "pick for Britain."
“If we are to harvest British fruit and vegetables this year, we need an army of people to help,” said his ruddy-faced royal highness, wearing a tie and tweed sporting jacket, his hand jammed into the pocket of his wrinkled mackintosh, standing in his own well-tilled garden at Birkhall, his estate in Scotland.
“It will be hard graft,” the prince warned, “but is hugely important if we are to avoid the growing crops going to waste.”
Like much of the agriculture in the developed world, British fruit and vegetable growers are dependent on migrant workers, and in England’s case, in normal years, they come mostly from Bulgaria and Romania.
The coronavirus, though, has disrupted movement across Europe. British growers say that even with special charter flights to bring workers in from Eastern Europe, the pool has dwindled because of travel restrictions, and because workers are afraid to come to the United Kingdom. With more than 36,000 confirmed dead from the virus, Britain has the highest death toll in Europe.
While Britain hasn’t seen any food shortages during the pandemic, there’s concern about fruit rotting on the vine. That’s where Charles comes in.
So many people answered the royal call that the “Pick for Britain” website crashed on Wednesday — letting newspaper columnists crow that the myth of the lazy Brit is finally being retired.
But here’s the hitch: Picking soft berries and leafy greens requires considerable skill and backbreaking physical toil for low pay. Farmers are worried that of the thousands of Brits who have forwarded applications, many won’t show up or won’t last the season, especially after they get their hands dirty.
British farmers typically employ more than 70,000 seasonal workers, who pour into the country each spring, summer and fall to pick curly endive and gala apples for about $125 a day, six days a week. In 2019, an estimated 1 percent of the field hands were from Britain.
Last year — amid warnings that an abrupt Brexit would lead to a shortage of farmworkers — The Washington Post spent days searching for the rarest of the rare, a British-born berry picker. We eventually found four university students working on a strawberry farm in Herefordshire.
But that was before the pandemic, before approximately 7.5 million people in Britain had been furloughed.
Christine Snell of the A.J & C.I Snell farm said so far this year she’s recruited 200 Eastern Europeans to work the family fields — and they are already busy.
Snell interviewed another 45 Brits by email — the most homegrown applicants ever — but just 14 of them committed. The British workers are set to arrive in coming days, when they’ll be trained and put to work with low-skill maintenance gardening — not picking the precious and delicate strawberries, which requires speed and skill.
“I’m very nervous who will show up and who will stay,” she said of the British workers. She imagines that folks might get the wrong idea about the “Pick for Britain” plea — that “it’s all rosy summer glow, all hands to the pump, a war effort, like Dad’s Army,” a BBC sitcom.
Jack Ward, chief executive of the British Growers Association, said his group surveyed its members to find that most in May have “enough-ish pickers. I say ‘ish’ because, as one said, you never know until they actually turn up if they will turn up.”
He said that “if everything goes to plan,” as much as a third of the seasonal workforce will come direct from Britain, “and that’s a major increase.”
Even if the Brits roll up their sleeves, Ward said growers are concerned about productivity; recruits are 20 to 30 percent less productive than experienced ones.
“If you look at the lettuce industry, which is now hitting top gear, doing 1 million heads of lettuce a day, that’s a massive logistical challenge, and you can’t do that all with rookie labor,” he said.
Farmers are also anxious that furloughed workers who take a chance with field work might return to their old jobs once Britain eases out of its lockdown in June and July.
“I don’t think anyone is sitting there saying, ‘I got this nailed.’ They are sitting there, fingers crossed, saying, ‘We are okay for the next week, or maybe the following one,’ ” Ward said.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/worl...77d074-9a08-11ea-ad79-eef7cd734641_story.html
Too soft, stupid, and lazy to pick fruit.
Rule Brittania.