Funding future in produce
15 September 2006 12:21 | Europe
Chris White
European fresh fruit and vegetable businesses are benefiting from the historically high levels of movement of workers now happening across the EU.
This is one of the conclusions to be drawn from the latest statistics published just over two years after 10 countries from eastern Europe joined the European Union and more or less a year before Romania and Bulgaria are due to join as full members of the EU.
It seems that the current levels of cross-European migration, which are almost unparalleled in the EU’s 50-year history, are allowing economic sectors such as food processing to thrive in the face of intense competition.
That is surely true of the fresh fruit and vegetable sector, which more than many other sectors of the economy has to come to rely on large numbers of relatively low-paid, hard-working people to bring its products to the market.
This applies especially to the more affluent parts of the EU, where the cost of living is higher and wages have had to keep pace with growth.
For example, the latest UK government figures released last month show that some 447,000 eastern Europeans have registered to work in the UK since May 2004.
Most of these new migrants come from Poland, which alone contributed over 200,000 people, with almost all of them aged 18 to 34.
The figures show that many of these migrants to the UK are now employed in the food businesses, with the fresh produce sector an employer of significant size.
No wonder that East Anglia and Kent, both locations of much of Britain’s fresh produce growing and handling operations, are both regions that are now home to the largest number of migrants from the new member states.
“A lot of businesses rely on these people to pick the harvest and the harvest doesn’t wait. It’s ready and it has to be delivered to customers,” commented Philip Hudson, chief horticultural adviser of the National Farmers’ Union, the UK’s main agricultural group. “These people are absolutely vital. Without them, some businesses wouldn’t be able to function at all.”
Immigration has helped push the UK population to over 60m for the first time, with numbers growing by 375,000 or 0.6 per cent in the year to June 2006. This is the fastest growth rate since 1965 and the largest annual increase in the UK population since 1962.
Significantly, government figures also show that the new migrants to Britain are staying for relatively short periods of time. Although net migration to the UK reached 222,600 more migrants coming in than leaving in 2004, some 193,000 of these new migrants say they want to return to their country of origin within two years. As one newspaper put it, this is “a guest workforce that doesn’t stay long”.
Happy to take the kind of low paid jobs that are shunned by their Western European counterparts, these new migrants are very often highly-skilled young people with very big ambitions.
Many of them have left their own countries to profit from the higher wages abroad. And many of them are also here to develop their skills.
You can bet that some of these new migrants who today are working on a packing line somewhere in western Europe will tomorrow be among those entrepreneurs to set up their own fresh produce businesses in eastern Europe.
So fresh produce businesses over here, which are already finding it difficult to get young people to join our sector, could do worse than to identify the brightest and the best of these new migrants to help them take their businesses forward.
After all, isn’t this a sector that prides itself on people who know what it means to get their hands dirty?
European fresh fruit and vegetable businesses are benefiting from the historically high levels of movement of workers now happening across the EU.
This is one of the conclusions to be drawn from the latest statistics published just over two years after 10 countries from eastern Europe joined the European Union and more or less a year before Romania and Bulgaria are due to join as full members of the EU.
It seems that the current levels of cross-European migration, which are almost unparalleled in the EU’s 50-year history, are allowing economic sectors such as food processing to thrive in the face of intense competition.
That is surely true of the fresh fruit and vegetable sector, which more than many other sectors of the economy has to come to rely on large numbers of relatively low-paid, hard-working people to bring its products to the market.
This applies especially to the more affluent parts of the EU, where the cost of living is higher and wages have had to keep pace with growth.
For example, the latest UK government figures released last month show that some 447,000 eastern Europeans have registered to work in the UK since May 2004.
Most of these new migrants come from Poland, which alone contributed over 200,000 people, with almost all of them aged 18 to 34.
The figures show that many of these migrants to the UK are now employed in the food businesses, with the fresh produce sector an employer of significant size.
No wonder that East Anglia and Kent, both locations of much of Britain’s fresh produce growing and handling operations, are both regions that are now home to the largest number of migrants from the new member states.
“A lot of businesses rely on these people to pick the harvest and the harvest doesn’t wait. It’s ready and it has to be delivered to customers,” commented Philip Hudson, chief horticultural adviser of the National Farmers’ Union, the UK’s main agricultural group. “These people are absolutely vital. Without them, some businesses wouldn’t be able to function at all.”
Immigration has helped push the UK population to over 60m for the first time, with numbers growing by 375,000 or 0.6 per cent in the year to June 2006. This is the fastest growth rate since 1965 and the largest annual increase in the UK population since 1962.
Significantly, government figures also show that the new migrants to Britain are staying for relatively short periods of time. Although net migration to the UK reached 222,600 more migrants coming in than leaving in 2004, some 193,000 of these new migrants say they want to return to their country of origin within two years. As one newspaper put it, this is “a guest workforce that doesn’t stay long”.
Happy to take the kind of low paid jobs that are shunned by their Western European counterparts, these new migrants are very often highly-skilled young people with very big ambitions.
Many of them have left their own countries to profit from the higher wages abroad. And many of them are also here to develop their skills.
You can bet that some of these new migrants who today are working on a packing line somewhere in western Europe will tomorrow be among those entrepreneurs to set up their own fresh produce businesses in eastern Europe.
So fresh produce businesses over here, which are already finding it difficult to get young people to join our sector, could do worse than to identify the brightest and the best of these new migrants to help them take their businesses forward.
After all, isn’t this a sector that prides itself on people who know what it means to get their hands dirty?
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