Pick of fruit crop could be left to rot

IT IS one of the few blessings of what passes for summer in Scotland: thousands of tonnes of cheap, deliciously sweet, home-grown strawberries and raspberries.

But up to a fifth of this year's crop – worth an estimated £5.2m in the shops – is set to rot in the fields because of a chronic shortage of foreign workers to pick the fruit.

The problem, partly caused by strict new immigration rules, could result in supermarkets transporting more fruit from countries such as Holland to make up the difference.

Retail prices for Scottish strawberries – currently around £2.49 per kilo – and class 1 Scottish raspberries – about £2.99 per punnet – could rise as a result of the shortages.

Growers have warned there could be long term consequences of the labour shortage, with dozens of soft fruit farms disappearing. At present, 2,400 tonnes of raspberries and 4,600 tonnes of strawberries are produced north of the border annually.

One reason for the staffing problems is the fall in numbers of foreign workers 'fast-tracked' in to the UK to work in agriculture. In recent years the figure is down from 25,000 to 16,000, and the scheme is now limited to Romanians and Bulgarians.

Meanwhile, most Eastern European economies have strengthened while the pound has weakened against the euro, making the UK a less attractive place for migrant workers.

Farm manager Gary Bruce, of PJ Stirling in Arbroath, said: "It's going to be a major problem if we don't get people by the end of May. We certainly don't want to walk away from any fruit, but if it isn't picked by the third week in June it will be wasted."

Peter Loggie of the National Farmers Union (NFU) Scotland said: "This problem can potentially impact on shelves. There were instances last year when vegetable crops were not picked and supermarkets looked for produce elsewhere. It's not been a huge amount of waste in the past, but as we have a greater labour shortage there will be greater waste."

Andrew Cranston, director of Well Pict Scotland, which grows and supplies fruit to supermarkets, said: "We were expecting 20 people to arrive on May 20 and not one of them is coming. They would have stayed the whole season and picked about 135 tonnes of fruit between them."

Concordia, the supplier of most of Scotland's seasonal agricultural workers, has just 817 workers to fill 1,543 jobs on Scottish soft fruit farms.

Executive director Christine Lumb said: "Farmers are worried constantly from the end of one season to the beginning of the next whether there will be enough pickers for the crop they are planting.

"Most of the workers are not available until June because they are students. Soft fruit farmers are going to suffer the most because they need people from the beginning of May."

John Mitchell, owner of Allanhill strawberry and fruit farm near St Andrews, which supplies supermarkets with strawberries, said: "We rely totally on labour force to harvest the crop – if we don't have that labour force we don't have a soft fruit industry in the UK.

"The soft fruit industry in farming terms has been a major success; we produce very good quality fruit for a long season. It's grown locally, not imported, so it ticks all the right boxes.

"It would be a real shame to see the industry grind to a halt because of this whole political thing surrounding migrant labour. There are no mechanical means to harvest the crop. If we can't source enough labour to pick the crop there is no crop."

Well Pict Scotland will top up low Scottish fruit yields with Dutch, Belgian and Spanish produce.

Cranston said: "We have been here in Scotland for three years, and we set the company up so that we would not need to import fruit, especially in the Scottish season, but if we can't pick the fruit we can't make the supermarket order. The euro is so strong at the moment that importing the fruit is a big financial hit. Someone is going to have to pay for that somewhere."

If the expense is transferred down the chain, Scottish farmers will get low prices for their fruit, adding to economic problems which could see more growers shutting down or reducing crops next year.

Environmentalists are also outraged. Duncan McLaren, chief executive of Friends of the Earth Scotland, said: "Shifting food around huge distances is bad enough for the environment, let alone when that very same food is left rotting locally.

If supermarkets put less intense pressure on squeezing every last penny out of their suppliers they would be in a much better position to pay decent wages and so end this problem."

The berry best of Scotland

Advances in technology and an improving climate have made Scottish strawberries the best in the world, according to celebrity chef Nick Nairn.

"Scottish strawberries are just more strawberry-ish than the foreign ones," Nairn said. "It's the flavour you would recognise from a strawberry milkshake or whatever, and there is a higher concentration of it in Scottish strawberries. It has the balance between sugar and acid that all good fruit has. It's just the texture which is really soft and yielding, and this real concentration of berry fruit flavour in middle.

"With climate change getting really warm down south in the European growing countries the strawberries don't like a hot climate. The east coast of Scotland seems to have the perfect climate.

"When I was younger I remember strawberries were only good for about two weeks in July – the rest of the time they were a bit hard or flavourless. Now advances in berry technology means they are great all through the season right to November. We need to find new ways to get pickers if we are going to sustain such a great Scottish industry."