"HGV licence fast-track won’t stop UK food shortages, industry warns":Jdsk wrote: ↑14 Jul 2021, 1:20pmInterview with the President of the NFU:661-Pete wrote: ↑11 Jul 2021, 11:21pmGood reason to go veggie this coming Xmas! Although fruit and vegetables will also, quite likely, be impacted - partly because of a shortage of pickers.Jdsk wrote: ↑11 Jul 2021, 8:55pm A description of how it will affect Christmas. And of the increased food waste that it is causing.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/20 ... y-supplies
https://ukandeu.ac.uk/brexit-witness-ar ... e-batters/
includes:
UKICE: We’ve heard about asparagus rotting in the fields, strawberries unpicked, daffodils unpicked. Are those scare stories, or is there a significant issue with labour shortages?
MB: No, it’s a massively significant issue. Again, it was the engagement with Number 10 that got the global seasonal scheme of 30,000 over the line. We’ve now got the two licences in place for that. But our strawberries, our raspberries, our asparagus, our blueberries, are reliant on the dexterity of the human hand. We need people to harvest our fruit, vegetables, and flowers. There have been challenges.
The daffodil-growers in Cornwall will have faced enormous losses. We’ve got to make sure that we build what I would call bridges to more mechanisation, more automation. If we don’t do that, we will see things rotting in the fields, simply because we haven’t got the capability to pick them.
There are a lot of things that need to be done. We need to work collaboratively to incentivise a UK workforce. That isn’t going to happen overnight, because we’ve actively pushed people away from doing those jobs. It doesn’t mean to say that it won’t come back, but it’s going to take a lot of working together.
Fundamentally, we need to be producing much more of our fruit and veg here. Covid-19 has probably really shone a light on our diets, that a lot of them are not good diets, and we all need to have more fruit and veg in them. We’ve got the climate here to be growing it. I think, again, we need to be looking at producing more here. We’re still going to need a workforce.
There isn’t a silver bullet, but ignoring the situation and saying it isn’t important is not a way forwards. We’ve got to be able to look at, actually, how we enable these growers to have access to the workforce that they need.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/20 ... stry-warns
Jonathan