291–300 of 589 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess Eastern Europeans were the normal workers until now.
Oh, well if that's the status quo that makes sense. I assumed the normal workers were unavailable due to quarantine/etc.
Fruit and veg 'will run out' unless Britain charters planes to fly in farm workers from eastern Europe. UK urgently needs 90,000 labourers to pick crops that will otherwise die in the fields, warns charity. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/mar/28/fruit-an...
With 3 million people in the UK still without work that want it - and many more laid off, redundant or self-employed without clients, the solution should be obvious. Pay a decent wage and you'll get the people. The era of cheap labour is over.
A deflationary crisis is not supportive of high wages. Not in the least.
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Spain grows most of the fruit and veg, whilst the netherlands grow mostly flowers. The demand for flowers has somewhat waned and recently saw an article of flower farmers in Africa suffering as nowhere to sell and case of piles of flowers composting away. The impact in that market will be very impacting.
> whilst the netherlands grow mostly flowers. 38 km² of flowers in glasshouses and 272 km² of flowers on open ground. Total agricultural land use is 18163 km², 11815 km² of which is for growing grass and fodder, most of the remaining 6347 km² is food for human consumption, dominated by potatoes and grain. So not even 3%. We do not grow mostly flowers .
Hopefully this may incentivize people to be a bit more self-sufficient. Gardens that you grow your own, allotments - the mentality of that has been driven away over decades and now people are starting to smell the roses and realize they can't eat them. So in many avenues - complacency gets highlighted more and I'm sure many and much will change on the back of this period in time. Overall I'd say for the better. Certa…
This has nothing to do with "people". Securing the food supply is a matter of national security, which is why such a shortage of labour should have never been allowed to even happen. The correct way to go about this would have been subsidized pay for local farmhands, a directive that a given / high percentage of food crop must be preserved at any cost and regulation that subsidies that already go to agriculture do not go into profits but actually trickle down.
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Why aren't they just raising wages? There are many people who can work and need jobs simply a matter of finding the clearing price and passing it on to us consumers which I'm very happy to bear.
The price is set by wholesalers, especially supermarkets. I'm not convinced they can re-eqilibriate the market before the harvest spoils.
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If they can't get picked in time, they can can them, freeze them or dry them. Some will spoil beyond recovery, but not all has to be lost either.
uh you have to pick it before you can preserve it
Coworkers in Shenzhen are already saying that more fancier foods are already getting scarcer in the inland China, and prices are going up by day. China has done a massive livestock slaughter campaign when the quarantine was declared. That has actually depressed the food prices quite a bit for the first months, but after that, the prices have shot up. This is how they got that much meat: https://mustsharenews.com/wp-c…
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Numbers I've read is that farm labour accounts for ~10% of retail food cost for fruits. https://www.prb.org/usfarmworkersfoodprices/ If that doubles because they have to pay local labour rates, the price would go up 10%. Possibly less if it just eats into the margins through the rest of the chain. We might also see a shift toward less laborious foods, which is fine by me.
Farming doesn't strike me as high margin. This increase in costs could send many farmers out of business. That will push up food prices.
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Oh, well if that's the status quo that makes sense. I assumed the normal workers were unavailable due to quarantine/etc.
No, the 'normal' workers (you mean I guess local) were unwilling to do the work for so little, while intensively supporting this situation by their shopping habits.
If there’s 1 thing the US has it is food and the supply chain is excellent. If anything this is an opportunity for the US to make a move on trade with Britain and possibly the EU to export our Ag there, for awhile anyways.