Courgettes wasted by lack of pickers
AUCKLAND: Brett Heap is surrounded by food gone to waste — rows of courgettes he could not get picked because his expert, specialised workforce cannot get into the country.
His story is a peek past the curtains to see a looming disaster everyone saw coming but apparently noone knows how to solve.
New Zealand is heading into peak harvest season with too few workers to get fruit off trees or vegetables from the ground.
‘‘This could be my last crop,’’ Mr Heap said.
‘‘I’m at the point where I’m not going through it again.
‘‘I can accept losing a crop with weather, or disease, or water damage. I have real difficulty accepting I’m on the point of getting out of the industry because the Government doesn’t care.’’
Agriculture Minister Damien O’Connor declined to be interviewed on the issue, a spokeswoman saying the issue was before theCabinet and he would be meeting horticultural industry leaders this week.
Yet it is an issue that has been flagged since New Zealand came out of lockdown in May and now the country is well into picking season — with noone to pick fruit.
There have been incremental changes — visa extensions for workers trapped in New Zealand — but now the time to pick fruit and harvest vegetables has arrived and there is noone available to do the work.
Mr Heap knows industry body Horticulture NZ has raised it and he knows bureaucrats and ministers in Wellington are aware of the issue and have held extensive meetings about it.
All that talking has not got his courgettes off the ground and into shops, where they fetch about $6/kg as we enter summer (or an astonishing $30/kg, in winter 2019).
To do that, he needs about 10 staff who are in Thailand and unable to travel to New Zealand, as they have done for years through our Recognised Seasonal Employer scheme that brings in about 14,000 workers from other countries.
It allows those from other countries — mainly the Pacific but also Thailand and Malaysia — to visit New Zealand for specific seasonal work. The staff who came to work for Mr Heap were among the 418 workers who came from Thailand last year.
‘‘The thing that’s hard to handle for me is the dishonesty from [the] Government and the lack of effort. The Prime Minister said we were an essential business.
They’ve made no effort to get RSE workers into the country so we can carry on.
‘‘They’ve got all the excuses and nobody challenges them on it. All of us spring harvesters have been hung out to dry.’’
This year, Mr Heap planted 60,000 plants when he might usually plant 100,000. The level of planting was partly due to a lack of staff and partly caution. He cobbled together a workforce through locals and Thai agricultural workers resident in New Zealand.
Mr Heap said he could not understand why he and others could not manage quarantine, starting with a negative test before boarding a plane to fly to New Zealand, transport to the property on which they worked and isolation at that property and tests to confirm Covid19free status.
Government talk of employing New Zealanders was a ‘‘fallacy’’, he said, with those in New Zealand usually unable to cope with hard, outdoor work and lacking specialised picking and plantcare skills developed by returning RSE workers.
It also failed to account for the intensive nature of the picking season, where workers aimed to pick courgettes at their optimal size to meet market demand, providing shoppers with the ideal size.
If they were picked too small, the courgettes were worth less. Left too long, they grew to develop into marrows for which there was no market.
For Mr Heap’s business, it was geared to Thai workers with specialist knowledge that reduced waste and maximised profitability.
‘‘They have been here year after year. They know what they’re doing. They hit the ground running.’’
With their focus on the short work period, the RSE staff worked the twotothree month picking season with sevenday working weeks and working days that begin at dawn and finish on dark.
Hiring local staff meant juggling domestic and lifestyle responsibilities, and often social issues stemming from areas where regular work had not existed for decades. The working days were shorter which meant fewer courgettes got picked.
Mr Heap said the productivity differences between RSE workers and local workers was enormous. He needed at least two New Zealanders to do the work of one RSE worker, and the churn of local workers was huge.
‘‘My labour costs are through the roof. I believe if I’m in business I have the right to do the best that I can. I’m not allowed to do that at the moment.’’
Hort NZ chief executive Mike Chapman said it was incredible to be facing a harvest season with unresolved issues that were known about six months ago.
Mr Chapman wrote in May of the need for RSE workers. To now be in November with no plan to solve workforce problems was staggering.
‘‘We haven’t slowed down our campaign to say we need to have the borders opened.’’
The importation of Covid19 with Russian fishing crews recently was ‘‘definitely unhelpful’’ but did not undermine the case for industryled managed isolation and quarantine, he said.
‘‘We’re not even asking Government to pay for it.’’
Mr Chapman said productivity across the sector was down 20% to 30% currently and the lack of labour meant it faced a $1 billion earnings loss.
Act New Zealand leader David Seymour has repeatedly called on the Government to welcome RSE workers from Covidfree countries.
‘‘This Government is just completely out of touch with the reality of labour supply.’’
Asparagus and strawberry producers face a labour squeeze too. Kiwifruit, pipfruit, summerfruit and grapevines need thinning as summer arrives and December is the time of the annual cherry harvest.
Minister of Immigration Kris Faafoi said ‘‘strict border controls’’ was a large part of limiting community spread of Covid19 and ‘‘New Zealanders have made clear they value careful management of our borders’’.
Mr Faafoi said the Government continued to review workforce needs and was considering visa changes for those already in New Zealand. Changes to date had allowed about 6500 RSE workers to stay in New Zealand, and given about 11,000 working holidaymakers extensions to work in horticulture and viticulture through to June 30, 2021.
He said Covid19 meant ‘‘we are not able to operate in a world where it is businessasusual’’ and it meant sectors needed to find ways around a reliance on offshore workers. That included ‘‘offering better work conditions’’ and finding other ways of ‘‘attracting, training and retaining workers’’. — The New Zealand Herald