Читать книгу The Savvy Shopper - Rose Prince - Страница 15

When travelling around fruit and vegetable farms in the UK, it is impossible to miss the flexible workforce – the pickers and labourers without whom weeding and hand harvesting would be impossible. But it is also clear that the farms that are happy for a journalist to tour their premises and talk to their staff are unlikely to have much to be ashamed of. There are some excellent schemes for students, and in Jersey the relationship between the Madeira workers and the potato growers is good: living conditions are warm, in substantially built cottages, and the families earn enough from January to June to sustain their lives on the island of Madeira during the rest of the year.

But there are gangmasters who break every rule, exploiting the desperation of workers who want a life in Britain. They pay below the minimum wage and operate no limits to working hours. As a shopper, it is difficult to know who picked your carrots. Supermarkets say they try to keep track, but in practice this is hard to do. The new gangmaster laws that came in after the drowning of the cockle pickers at Morecambe Bay in 2004 are yet to be properly tested.

The tragic reality is that the children of today’s farmers are less and less likely to follow their parents into the business; indeed many are actively discouraged by their parents, and the workforce of the future is likely to be more and more made up of immigrant workers who will work for lower wages. The same workers are employed in processing plants and abattoirs, and as usual they are doing the filthy, tedious jobs. So we have a conundrum. We want to buy British, but buying British may encourage poor practice. If there is a solution, it is to seek out the vegetable box scheme or the farm that opens its doors to scrutiny. Food from such places will cost more, so it is a case of eating the cheaper-to-grow produce, choosing seasonally to get the best value from gluts, and perhaps deciding that pulses are going to play a greater part in your diet.

In exporting countries, the workforce question is also a serious matter, along with the wider impact of food production on populations. Poor monitoring of pesticide use is a much greater problem outside the UK and large numbers of people can be affected, including children – and child labour. Water supplies can be hijacked or polluted by unscrupulous industries; land is acquired from tribal populations who have only a few historical rights to it, their natural habitat subsequently flattened to make way for industrial farming. Information about such practice does filter back, however, and shoppers have a chance to boycott foods whose production causes people suffering.