Covid-19 raises questions about the viability of an economic system built on borderless migration and a single marketplace—especially in the bloc’s agricultural industry
Caroline Goursat had recently finished training as a flight attendant when France went into a strict coronavirus lockdown, sealing its borders and grounding planes. Days later, the 19-year-old was waking up at dawn to pick white asparagus at a farm in southern France.
“It’s quite taxing,” said Ms. Goursat, who spends half her day bending over to carefully pick the asparagus without snapping off their slender shoots.
Ms. Goursat is a soldier in France’s “great agricultural army,” thousands of locally recruited workers who are deploying to the country’s fields after the coronavirus pandemic disrupted the flow of seasonal laborers.
Covid-19 is tearing at the European Union’s binding principles, raising questions about the viability of an economic system built on borderless migration and a single marketplace that matches labor supply with demand. Nowhere is that more apparent than in the sudden reordering of its agricultural industry.
Normally, workers from poorer parts of the European Union, particularly Central and Eastern Europe, would take many of these jobs. Each spring they hopscotch the continent on buses, moving from farm to farm to plant and pick crops.
Now, with many borders closed because of the coronavirus pandemic, many in Western Europe are rethinking the dependence on distant pools of labor—and are trying to spur an interest in farm work among people closer to home.
The crisis is putting other practices of European agriculture under scrutiny, including the use of long-haul trucks to move livestock and produce, and farms’ growing specialization on niche, luxury products such as white asparagus.
When borders and businesses closed in mid-March, farmers were stuck with rotting crops that restaurants, hotels and other venues affected by the lockdowns were no longer buying.
The continent is beginning to relax national borders and reopen its economy, and farmers now need manpower to plant and harvest.
Travel is still restricted in many areas for nonessential workers. In response to the labor squeeze, the EU deemed seasonal workers essential, but countries have the final say on whether the laborers can cross their borders and under what conditions.
And many workers in Central and Eastern Europe, where the pandemic is less severe, are hesitant to travel to more heavily afflicted countries in the West, because of the health risk, particularly if it means crowding into buses.
Ewa Adam, a 45-year-old in Poland, had been planning to travel by bus, passing through Germany, to the south of France for a three-month farming stint that pays €8,000, or about $8,700.
“I can live comfortably in Poland for a year” with the money, Ms. Adam says.
But she’s putting it off, waiting for the spread of the virus to slow. She’s also spooked about the potential for sudden border closures, which would cut her off from elderly family members she looks after in Poland. “Both the German and French borders were a problem,” she says.
Farmers in the U.S. might face a similar shortage of labor as they sponsor visas for migrant workers from Mexico and other poorer countries. While the Trump administration has recently taken steps to make it easier for farms to hire migrant workers, on Monday night President Trump said all immigration would be temporarily halted. The executive order is expected to include exceptions for farmworkers, but details weren’t available.
Labor contractors who recruit, transport and house seasonal workers say they are checking workers’ temperatures before they cross the U.S.-Mexico border. They are also boosting sanitation at the motels, apartments and labor camps where workers live, setting aside rooms to isolate any ill workers.
The demand for seasonal farmworkers is less acute in the U.S., because farms are concentrated in the hands of fewer owners, who have embraced automation to a greater degree than Europeans. The U.S. grows a higher proportion of bulk crops, which are easier to plant and harvest with machinery.
In Europe, low-wage labor and hefty subsidies feed a patchwork of more than 10 million farms. Most are a fraction of the size of the average American farm. Instead of commodity grains and produce, many have focused on higher-value crops that require more hand labor. That caters to European palates accustomed to pearl-size Champagne grapes and mozzarella from buffalo’s milk.
In many cases, rich countries have a hard time filling jobs with local people, who can choose work with fewer physical demands and higher pay. But workers from Central and Eastern Europe are attracted by minimum wages in countries like France and Germany that are more than double what similar work pays at home.
People in some countries have raised concerns that foreign workers could help spread the virus. Antiforeigner sentiment in general has increased in some countries in recent years amid a rise of nationalist groups.
The Dutch government has rolled out an information campaign in several languages to reassure Eastern European workers that they are welcome in the Netherlands during the pandemic.
Germany has chartered planes to carry 80,000 laborers from Central and Eastern Europe, with the aim of reducing the exposure of bus travel through multiple countries. The workers are screened for any symptoms of the virus upon their arrival, including temperature checks, and bused to farms, where they are expected to live in dormitories, under quarantine conditions, until the end of May.
News of the German airlifts led to crowding at airports in Romania, where prosecutors are now investigating the recruitment firms for violating the country’s strict lockdown regulations. One Romanian worker died of coronavirus after arriving in Germany for the harvest........MUCH MORE
A similar situation in Britain. From PoAndPo Agrifish, April 27:
Furloughed UK workers will be encouraged to work as fruit pickers
Furloughed workers will be encouraged to take on a second job as fruit pickers during the summer harvest due to a lack of migrant workers, a Cabinet minister says.
