Strawberry crisis
Pickers help farmers bounce back from strawberry crisis
Three-year-old Jacob Carroll sits elated in a Perth strawberry field, mouth stuffed with berries. “Yummy,” he beams to his mum, Amanda Charles, 41, naturally oblivious as to why she’s brought him here. The two are among hundreds of West Australians who have flocked to Kien’s Strawberry Farm in Gnangara, north of Perth, to pick berries.
“We’re here to show the farmers we care,” says Amanda, whose cousin Amanda Harvey, 44, and her daughter Chloe, 15, trawl a nearby field for plump red berries. West Australian growers have opened their farms to the public to help clear excess berries after the sabotage catastrophe, which one grower has termed “the 9/11 for strawberries”.
Australia’s $280 million dollar strawberry industry is now in turmoil, with more than 100 instances of strawberries and other fruits contaminated with sewing needles reported around the nation in two weeks.
Half a kilometre up the road, at D’uva’s Strawberry Farm, it’s a similar scene. “It makes me so happy to see people supporting us while we’re going through this trauma,” says the farm’s owner, Doan Dep. “This is the worst thing that’s ever happened to our 18-year-old business. I’ve been crying on my husband’s shoulder every night.”
Bizarrely, one isolated case of needles in berries found in a punnet in Queensland quickly turned into a national crisis, the criminal behaviour repeatedly reoccurring Australia-wide. Across the nation, shops have removed certain brands from the shelves.
The alarm was raised on Sunday, Sept. 9, after Brisbane man Joshua Gane posted on Facebook that friend Hoani van Dorp had bitten into a strawberry and swallowed “half a sewing needle” and was in hospital with stomach pains. “We then checked the
other strawberries and found another sewing needle lodged inside one of them,” he posted. “They suspect it is foul play, but unsure whether it was via the supplier, Woolworths, or a customer.”
On Sept. 13, while cutting strawberries for her daughter, Gladstone mum Angela Stevenson found two needles in a punnet of strawberries from Woolworths. Realising she’d sent her son to school with berries, “I rang the school as quick as I could, to tell him not to eat the strawberries.” Too late, he’d already bitten into them and found a needle, but thankfully was not hurt.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison has since increased penalties for “food terrorists” to up to 15 years’ jail.
“We have no idea if all or some of the reported incidents have been carried out by copycats or whether they’re related,” a WA strawberry farmer, who did not want to be named, tells WHO. “While the public support and political support has been wonderful, there’s still a lot of growers who have had to shut up shop. They’ve just stopped picking. Many farmers will no longer talk about this publicly; this makes the problem worse.”
But back at D’uva’s Strawberry Farm, Doan Dep is grateful West Australians are showing up to buy her produce. “For days, we couldn’t sell any strawberries. Then we got to sell some at half the price,” she says. As for her 20 workers, “I am still keeping them on and paying them, but of course it’s cost me so much money.”
On Sept. 23, a New Zealand supermarket announced it would no longer purchase strawberries from Australia, after needles were found in a punnet of WA strawberries sold in NZ. “We export to other countries and we still don’t know what lies ahead. Every customer who comes back and buys strawberries is helping the problems go away,” says Doan Dep.