A decline in the number of Bulgarian, and Romanian, seasonal workers is threatening to spoil Britain's soft fruits harvest, British newspaper The Independent reported on May 12.
Once a lucrative business, which drew thousands of labourers, many of them students, this year British producers struggled to recruit enough people to pick the 50,000 tons of strawberries, raspberries and other soft fruits grown in the country for the local market.
Part of the reason is the fact that UK authorities have restricted the seasonal agricultural workers scheme (Saws), which had previously allowed workers from non-European Union countries such as Ukraine and Belarus to do the low-skilled picking work in Britain, to citizens of Romania and Bulgaria, The Independent said.
But Romanians and Bulgarians are now reluctant to travel to the UK to earn an income around the minimum wage for hard manual labour, given that the British pound is losing ground against Eastern European currencies, while the labour shortage at home offered increased opportunities for employment.
"Romanians and Bulgarians simply don't want to come to the UK in sufficient numbers and other nationalities can find work in shops and bars," the daily quoted Rachel Hubbard, director of Fruitful, a Worcestershire-based company that recruits Saws workers, as saying.
"Their aspirations are higher and with the free right to work, EU workers are going to factories, hospitality, things like the Olympics project, service stations and nursing homes," according to Christine Snell, who runs a farm with her husband near Hereford.
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 £220 million (277 million euro), The Independent said. This year, losses caused by the shortage of labour could trump last year's figures, when an estimated £20 million (25.2 million euro) worth of fruit and vegetables were left rotting in fields across the UK.
