Strawberry fields forsaken

It's common here in the UK to hear people bemoan the amount of immigrants in the country, despite the fact that the immigrants tend to do the jobs that UK citizens traditionally refuse to do.

Now the falling pound and new restrictions on the number of seasonal labourers allowed to enter Britain are finally revealing just how dependent on those immigrants our economy has become.

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.

One Herefordshire farmer faces the loss of strawberries worth £200,000 and Scottish growers are warning they could lose up to a fifth of this year's crop, worth £5.2m. Gary Bruce, manager of a fruit farm in Arbroath, said: "If we don't get people by the end of May, it's a major problem. If the fruit isn't picked by 3 June it will be wasted."

I saw a programme recently in which a young British man was telling a TV crew how the immigrants were stealing all the jobs. The interviewer offered him a job paying well. The young guys eyes lit up until it was revealed that the job involved picking fruit, at which point he announced that he "would rather sign on".

Our economy is much more reliant on immigrants than our politicians would ever confess, and it looks as if it will be the farmers who will, sadly, pay the price for this deception.

The National Farmers Union (NFU) told The Independent that the labour shortage is worse than last year, when a smaller dip in the supply of pickers left an estimated £20m of fruit and vegetables putrefying in fields across the UK. Britain's soft-fruit industry, concentrated in Scotland, East Anglia, Kent and the Midlands, has been a success story in the past five years, growing by about 7 per cent a year and is now worth £220m.

But it is likely the labour shortage will result in supermarkets importing large quantities of produce from countries such as the Netherlands to make up the shortfall in stock and prices rising above current levels of about £2.50 for a kilogram of strawberries and £2.99 for a punnet of raspberries.

One reason being put forward for the staffing problems by growers is a government decision to reduce the number of workers allowed to enter Britain on a longstanding scheme aimed at foreign students.

The Seasonal Agricultural Workers Scheme (Saws), which had previously allowed workers from non-EU countries such as Ukraine and Belarus to do the low-skilled picking work in Britain, is this year restricted to citizens of Romania and Bulgaria, who are members of the EU.

It seems scandalous to me that, whilst people around the world are starving, we will literally have fruit rotting on the vines. And all for the want of someone to pick it.

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Tags: Immigrants, fruit picking, UK economy, UK politics