First came Brexit. Then the coronavirus. And now, there’s the very real prospect that mountains of perfectly good food will be left to rot in fields up and down the UK. The reason? We don’t have the people to pick it. Yet.
Eating your greens is important. Even during a coronavirus lockdown, you cannot subsist only on stockpiles of penne, baked beans, and toilet paper, and hope to stay reasonably healthy. The problem with fruits and vegetables, though, is that – before appearing daily on your supermarket’s shelves – they need to be picked from the field.
Doing that picking are so-called seasonal agricultural workers, people who essentially only show up at the farm during harvest season. According to the Office for National Statistics, as of 2018, 99 per cent of seasonal workers in the UK come from the EU – in particular from Eastern European countries like Romania and Bulgaria. With Europe now in the throes of a coronavirus outbreak, many of those workers have suddenly become either legally unable or simply unwilling to come to the UK. This might be a problem for your lockdown five-a-day plans.
Brexit hit farms hard. Coronavirus may leave food rotting in the fields
The coronavirus outbreak has precipitated Britain's agricultural labour crisis
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