Western Europe's farms depend on seasonal workers, many from Eastern Europe. Coronavirus lockdowns are creating a scramble to find hands to pick strawberries, asparagus and other crops.
By Nick Kostov, Stacy Meichtry and Bojan Pancevski | Photographs by Christophe Goussard/Agence VU for The Wall Street Journal April 21, 2020 1:19 pm ET 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.
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. The continent is beginning to relax national borders and reopen its economy, and farmers now need manpower to plant and harvest.
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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. 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 scramble, farmers and officials say, shows the need for structural change to guarantee Europe’s food security. With the threat of a disrupted single market, countries might need to farm more staples for stockpiling and produce fewer delicacies like asparagus, farmers say. It also means developing a local workforce or increasing automation.
The bloc has also increased subsidies, which totaled nearly €59 billion in 2018, by allowing countries to provide up to €125,000 in state aid for each farm and €800,000 for food processing firms.The German government aims to recruit 10,000 workers domestically, by allowing asylum seekers to work and offering temporary contracts to students and the unemployed.
French farmers launched a website where French workers—mainly students and service-economy workers benched by the lockdown—could apply to work at farms in need of manpower. By early April, more than 5,000 farms had hired workers. About 280,000 people have applied. The busy season for picking Mr. Jouy’s strawberries is in March and April, and the fruit’s price was beginning to recover after taking a nosedive at the start of the lockdown, when the French were stocking up on pasta and toilet paper. “March was catastrophic,” Mr. Jouy said.
Asparagus is one of the first crops that is harvested in Europe, and it is prized by Germans and other northern Europeans who like to eat them when their shoots are white.
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