BRUSSELS (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 12th May, 2020) With the onset of the harvesting season amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Europe faces a dilemma of whether to lose ripe fruits and berries or harvest them on time but face the risk of aggravating the spread of the coronavirus by letting seasonal workers from Eastern Europe travel westward for their usual journey.
The coronavirus pandemic has hit the agricultural sector frontally at the worst possible time, as harvest and planting seasons are in full swing. European host countries are torn between the fear of importing the infection with seasonal workers and the fear of seeing their agricultural producers lose harvests.
There is a good knowledge of the fact that these are temporary workers, coming every year for two to three months and then returning home.
At the same time, locals fear that even such a short period is enough for clusters of infection to emerge as migrant workers mainly live in overcrowded dormitories with poor sanitary standards, while workers themselves fear that they will get the virus while abroad and then transport it back home.
And they fear exploitation, of course.
MOST SEASONAL WORKERS COME FROM POOR COUNTRIES
The overwhelming majority of the salaried workforce in European horticulture and agriculture is of foreign origin. With the border closures in the beginning of the pandemic in Europe, national authorities turned to all available labor to help with sowing, harvesting and other seasonal agricultural jobs.
Southern Europe, in particular, has been displaying an increasing tendency of adopting the Californian model of agriculture, namely when only a few regions specialize in production, while cheap workforce comes from other, poorer, regions. John Steinbeck vividly described it in his Pulitzer-winning book "The Grapes of Wrath" how poor peasants leave poor states and flock to those where jobs are available, even if on worse conditions, during the Great Depression.
In modern Europe, however, states largely issue local salaries which are more than attractive for seasonal workers from the poorest European countries.
"In Belgium, most of our seasonal workers come from Poland, Bulgaria and Romania. They are paid Belgian wages. It is rather low for a Belgian citizen, but for them, with their cost of life in their own country, it is very interesting. These people are professionals, often working in a family and the whole family comes," Claude Vanhemelen, the secretary general of the Walloon Horticulture Federation, told Sputnik.
According to him, in the years before the pandemic, these workers were allowed in for 65 days, but this year they were allowed to stay for 130 days.
Belgium reopened the border to agricultural workers on May 4. Before that, Vanhemelen described the absence of a workforce to pick up strawberries, salads and other edible plants as a "great problem" and "chaos."
"Producers have tried to employ migrants who are in Belgium, asylum seekers, but it did not work out very well. As for Belgian unemployed people, you must realize that it is hard work, being on the field at 6 am or even 5:30 am and it is tiring to collect, so unemployed people hesitate; some for family reasons, such as children and the difficulty starting so early," Vanhemelen said.
Additionally, many locals refuse to work because the unemployment benefits in Belgium are nearly as high as the pay they would get for picking berries, so there is really little incentive for them to work, he added.
The government should come up with incentives to persuade more local people with satisfactory health to accept these seasonal jobs, Gilles Lebreton, a French member of the European parliament from the National Front party, told Sputnik, pointing to the case of France specifically.
According to the International Labour Organization, seasonal workers are among the "poorest of the poor." The wages offered are, nevertheless, more attractive than what seasonal workers can hope for in their country of origin.
EUROPE-TO-EUROPE SEASONAL WORKERS NOT SEEN AS THREAT
"I personally support the temporary reception of seasonal agricultural workers from Eastern Europe. This is good economy: it does not imply migration or nationality issues, it procures work and revenue to low-skilled people, and they go back home once the harvest is done. Our agriculture needs these seasonal workers and they are Europeans, so the migration risk they represent is very low," Gilles Lebreton told Sputnik.
He also spoke sharply against the employment of illegal migrants, even if it is temporary.
"They are illegals and it should not be a back door for them to get the right to stay. They must be repatriated," Lebreton said.
Henry Tonneau, a local producer of strawberry in the Belgian town of Wepion, lamented having to deal with many unscrupulous workers among asylum seekers before he found female workers with satisfactory work standards.
"I have lost tons of fruit at the beginning of the season, since we could not get the hands to pick up the berries. Then I got migrants asking for asylum in Belgium, who were allowed to work, but few did pick up the fruit carefully enough; they did not care and mashed the fragile fruit in the little baskets, so I had to fire them," he told Sputnik, adding "Now, I have my team all right, mostly women, they are more careful and show great dexterity."
In Italy, the issue of employment of illegal migrants appears to be a bone of contention in the government, as stated by Pietro Fiocchi, member of the European Parliament from the Italian right-wing party Fratelli d'Italia. According to the lawmaker, there is a "deep division" and "a political battle" inside the ruling coalition, as Minister of Agriculture Teresa Bellanova is threatening to resign and quit if the government does not make all illegal immigrants regular.
"But we see a major health risk with the newly arrived illegal immigrants from Libya, since the government of [Prime minister Giuseppe] Conte has again tolerated their free entry into Italy, which is a major error. If one of these sub-Saharan migrants is infected in the overcrowded boat that they come in, by the time they arrive in Italy, they are all infected on board," he told Sputnik.
Yet the lawmaker said he saw no public health threats associated with migrants coming from other European countries, the same people about whom Lebreton expressed concerns that they get "subjected to a minimum health controls."
"The usual EU seasonal workers from Romania and other East European countries are not a problem. There has not been any discussion about them. Since they are citizens of the EU, they only need an authorization to travel and they can come and go," Fiocchi told Sputnik, adding "We do not see a particular problem with Eastern European workers in terms of COVID-19 transmission, as the impact of the coronavirus has been very limited on most of those countries, especially Bulgaria, Romania or Greece."
In Belgium, Claude Vanhemelen of the Walloon Horticulture Federation agreed, saying that "for COVID-19, there is no specific problem since their lodgings are equivalent to what the Belgians would get, they get transported by van to the fields, and in their country in Eastern Europe, they have much less people ill of the coronavirus."
However, neither of these speakers specified whether the low rates of infection in certain Eastern European countries are a result of a genuine passivity of the virus or flaws and shortages in the diagnostic capacity.
Last week, Germany saw new COVID-19 outbreaks occurring at two slaughterhouses, with 109 cases in a slaughterhouse of the Segeberg district in the northern state of Schleswig-Holstein and 200 cases at a meat processing plant in the Coesfeld town in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia. Both have large groups of seasonal workers.
Speaking on the matter, Jurgen Pohl, a Bundestag lawmaker from the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, said at a press release that the coronavirus outbreak in Coesfeld "has drastically exposed a common practice: miserable working conditions for employees in the meat industry - many of them from other EU countries."
"Of course, we have to protect the workers who come to Germany from Romania and Bulgaria - from corona and from modern slavery, which was a huge problem long before. Of course, when people live together in a single room for eight, they infect each other, no matter how strictly the hygiene rules are checked at work," Guido Reil, a German lawmaker at the European Parliament from the AfD party, told Sputnik.
According to Reil, the unrestricted movement of people in the EU has led to wage dumping in many areas and the current health crisis only made obvious how devastating that practice was. It applies both to local workers, who have stayed jobless, and for guest workers, who are paid so little that all that they can afford is sleeping in an eight-bed dorm.
"I generally welcome border controls. During the crisis, tests must be carried out at the borders to protect us and everyone who is already in the country. In the long term, however, we must reasonably restrict free movement in the EU, prevent wage dumping and pay decent wages again," the lawmaker said.
