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An apple farmer in Conservative MP Laura Sandy’s Kent constituency gets just \u00a380 a tonne for bruised and mis-shapen fruit rejected by the supermarkets. When she visits local schools and asks how many children are planning a career in food science and production, teaching staff say they don’t want them picking beans out in the fields.<\/p>\n
The UK food sector employs 400 000 people, but the workforce has shrunk by 22% in nine years and 96% of food companies emply less than 250 people. It is the UK’s biggest manufacturing sector by jobs and revenues. Sandy has a solution for the fruit farmer – setting up a company called “ugly fruit” to take on the supermarkets. But what to do about the food industry’s image problem among young people?<\/p>\n
Addressing a City University food policy symposium in London earlier this month, she said: “Food is a very sexy and exciting opportunity for young people. In the US there used to\u00a0be a Future Farmers Foum for everybody in urban areas. We need to connnect back to where our food comes from.”<\/p>\n
Not everybody working in the food industry wanders around in a lab coat, of course. Much of it is still picking crops, milking cows, often in freezing conditions with a working day starting at the crack of dawn. Migrant workers have flocked to “factory farms” in the eastern counties of England. Last year a BBC documentary <\/a>asked if jobless Britons are scared by hard work, visiting Wisbech, a Cambridgeshire market town.<\/p>\n In the past six years 9,000 immigrant workers have passed through. But unemployment is 40% above the national average. Fellow symposium speaker Charlie Clutterbuck, a research fellow at City University, probably had towns like Wisbech in mind when he said: “Nobody is asking what will happen when half a million eastern European workers don’t want to come to this land and work in crap conditions for shit wages.”<\/p>\n Farming is facing a demographic timebomb. Half of all UK farmers are aged over 65, according to Cluttberburck. Recruitment and retention suffered a fresh blow in October, when MPs finally voted <\/a>to scrap the Agricultural Wages Board, set up 63 years ago to set the wages of 150 000 farm workers, part of the coalition government’s “bonfire of the quangos.”<\/p>\n “How do you determine whether food production is ethical or exploitative?” asked Cluttberbuck. In October last year seven Romanian children <\/a>were taken into care after a Gangmaster Licencing Authority raid found them picking onions with around 50 adults in a freezing field.<\/p>\n Supermarket chains, fearful of brand damage, can provide important leverage in such cases, he told the symposium. Their intervention can halt exploitative practices. It’s a shame they can’t be persuaded to sell ugly fruit.<\/p>\n David Payne<\/strong> is editor, bmj.com<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" An apple farmer in Conservative MP Laura Sandy’s Kent constituency gets just \u00a380 a tonne for bruised and mis-shapen fruit rejected by the supermarkets. When she visits local schools and asks how many children are planning a career in food science and production, teaching staff say they don’t want them picking beans out in the […]<\/p>\n