UK needs to be more selfsufficient

Peter Cook asks (letters, April 9) where our fruit and vegetable pickers come from and wonders whether what he calls ‘Brexit ideology’ will prevent the government chartering planes to bring in armies of low-paid migrant workers from Eastern Europe to pick this year’s fruit and vegetable crops.

I don’t think it will be Brexit that would prevent such an operation so much as the coronavirus pandemic and the associated social distancing rules.

But it is that same pandemic with its adverse effects on employment in the UK which means there is unlikely to be a shortage of people amongst the laid-off workers and the senthome students who are able and willing to step in and see that farmers get their fruit and vegetables into the shops.

But even in more normal times, it is questionable whether a comparatively wealthy country like the UK should be reliant on importing gangs of low-paid workers from poorer parts of the EU to pick its home-grown fruit and vegetables. I can see the advantages in terms of lower prices in the shops or, perhaps, higher profits for the producers, but the virus is demonstrating how it might be better to be more self-sufficient in such areas and provide better paid work which local people are prepared to do and to invest more in machinery to automate the process rather than exploit the willingness of the less well-off from poorer parts of Europe to take on, sometimes back-breaking, work for very low wages and in poor conditions. Antony Ward

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