Central Asians flocked to Britain to work as farmers

Post-Brexit, British farms no longer rely on Romanian or Polish workers but on a workforce from Central Asia.

"The money I earn here in a week is equal to a month in my hometown. I came here for the money," said the young man who used to be a water filtration project manager for a large bank in Kyrgyzstan. He took the opportunity to answer while loading boxes of strawberries onto a truck on Christine Snell's family farm in Herefordshire.

Christine Snell's family owns about 160 hectares growing strawberries, raspberries, and blackcurrants. After Brexit (Britain left the European Union), workers in the bloc no longer moved freely to the UK, so her family had to recruit people from further afield.

"Now they come from countries (country names with the last word stan) like Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan," she said. Today, Central Asia is replacing Central Europe as the source of labor needed to pick 1,000 tons of strawberries and keep packing plants running.

During peak summer, her farm needs nearly 300 people and drops to about 40 when winter comes. Most workers live on-site in mobile homes for up to six months, corresponding to the length of their visa. They receive a minimum wage of 10.42 pounds (equivalent to 12.76 USD) an hour, plus bonuses that can be up to 50% or more for fruit picking productivity.

Workers pick strawberries on Mrs. Christine Snell's farm. Photo: Le Monde

On British fields, the foreign workforce is now divided into different levels. At the forefront are Europeans who arrived before Brexit and have obtained settled status, giving them the right to stay in the UK. For example, Ion Avram, a Romanian, has been working on Ms. Snell's farm for 19 years.

He returned home in the winter and returned to harvest every summer. "The work is hard but I come every year to earn money," Avram said. Next is the new generation of people, most of whom do not speak English, leading to communication challenges. "I speak a little Russian, so do they, and we can understand each other in that language," Avram said.

In the hills near the border with Wales, Mrs Snell has seen waves of immigrants since establishing the farm with her husband more than three decades ago. In the late 1990s, droves of Russians and Ukrainians arrived under the temporary visa system. The program then expanded to the countries of the European Union, including eight Central European countries in 2004 and adding Romania and Bulgaria three years later.

Thanks to that, Britain has a large immigrant labor force. But since January 1, 2021, when leaving the European common market, this system has ended. Employers need to find workers from farther away. Additionally, Russians and Ukrainians have not arrived since the conflict.

However, Ms Snell, who voted for Brexit, said this was not an issue. "We do not lack labor. At first, it was true that the government did not issue enough visas, not to mention the complicated Covid-19 epidemic. But now, we have no problems recruiting," she said.

Every fall, she contacts one of the five officially recognized agencies that recruit seasonal workers to book staff for the next season. She even finds it better to hire European staff, who tend not to stay on the farm and leave after a few weeks if they find the work too difficult.

"With a temporary visa, workers are tied to the farm that employed them. If they want to change employers, they must ask me and get permission from the Ministry of Home Affairs. Otherwise, they will be stuck here," Snell explains.

Mobile homes for migrant workers to reside at Christine Snell's farm. Photo: Le Monde

But not everyone finds it easy. John Shropshire, President of agricultural products group G's Fresh, said accepting immigrant workers is very important to fill the human resource gap in the food supply chain. However, attracting is increasingly difficult.

One of the promises of Brexit was to reduce immigration, "taking back control of our borders", as former prime minister Boris Johnson said many times. This has collided with economic reality. Initially, the British government limited the number of seasonal agricultural visas to 30,000.

This year, they must increase the limit to 45,000 and have the ability to increase it by another 10,000 if necessary. According to the report published by Shropshire, that is not enough: "Lifting the limit must be considered. The visa needs to be for a period of nine months to account for the longer harvest period," the company reports.

The lack of farmers illustrates Britain's failed attempt to eliminate cheap foreign labor. Calling for Brexit, then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson promised a "high-wage, high-skill, high-productivity" economy. This means issuing fewer visas and growing on-the-job training.

But up to now, the opposite has happened. Immigration has doubled since Brexit came into effect, with almost 600,000 people moving to the UK in 2022. This figure takes into account 114,000 Ukrainians and 52,000 from Hong Kong because of geopolitical factors. But in general, the migration flow has not stopped but only changed nationality. Europeans now make up just 13% of new arrivals, despite making up more than half before Brexit.

Mrs Snell is keen to recruit locally, but the unemployment rate in Herefordshire is only 3%. There are very few people willing to spend all day picking strawberries for minimum wage. Berries are now grown on high trellises so pickers can stand and harvest instead of squatting all day like before. But improving employment conditions is not enough. Meanwhile, farms cannot increase wages because of price pressure from large supermarkets.

In the town of Spalding on the East Coast of England, migrant workers from Central Europe are still common. With many vegetable farms, this agricultural region is known as "Britain's food valley". This place has had a large number of immigrants over the past 20 years, so there is little need for additional seasonal workers. Local grocery stores have names like "Warsaw Supermarket", "Baltic" and "Kabanosik". Many staffing agencies are run by Poles and Lithuanians.

In Matthew Naylor's sunflower fields, most of the workers are Lithuanian. They are paid 2.3 British pence (nearly 2.9 cents USD) for each flower. Naylor said they are guaranteed a minimum wage but earn much more, up to 1,500 pounds ($1,860) per week in high season. "Recently, they complained about higher taxes, 40%. They asked me to pay extra because other competitors were doing the same," he said.

Matthew Naylor opposes Brexit but also admits that it is probably necessary. "There was a time when a lot of cheap laborers were willing to work without toilets in the fields. That's gone and that's a good thing," he said. He hopes the new situation in the agricultural sector will lead to more mechanization and improved working conditions for workers.