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Comment by aazaa | Hacker News Reader

> From Huelva to Hamburg and Newcastle to Naples, Europe’s farmers are struggling to find people to bring in rapidly ripening fruits and vegetables, which frequently must be hand-picked, usually within a window of just a few days. They typically rely on seasonal workers from eastern Europe or northern Africa, but fears of the coronavirus are keeping hundreds of thousands of migrant laborers from leaving home, and controls on once-unfettered borders are stopping many of those willing to make the trip.

This is a recipe for shortage. Unlike funbucks dashed off by central banks without so much as breaking a sweat, it takes actual work to grow, harvest, and distribute crops. It also takes time.

All of these things can't be faked the way that currency can.

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It's funny how everybody (in the first world) just takes for granted the fact that a large part of the agricultural workforce is low-paid migrant workers. All of us want our food to be available all year round, and cheap. It's been my opinion for a while that food prices do not represent the real cost of food production when taking into account all the externalities. Low-wage labor is just one of those externalities.

Modern market economics is a ... marvel ... of numerous uncosted externalities.

Pollution, labour, externalised risk, unaccounted systemic risks, natural resource depletion and formation costs, political power, corruption...

> it takes actual work to grow, harvest, and distribute crops.

I look forward to the test of "Europeans don't want to do _____ work" when the shit-pay factor is removed.

do you also look forward to the 10x grocery shit-bill you will be stuck with?

Yes.

Sure if it means people are being paid a fair wage. I should pay more for things where I'm exploiting labor tbh.

Somehow I think your keyboard bravado will vanish once you start paying 60-70% of salary for just basic necessities. And even if I were to concede that you - presumably high paid tech workers - were willing & able, imagine the fate of the pensioners, bus drivers, retail workers...they barely make ends meet as it is.

So we should continue exploiting, is what you are saying?

I am not thrilled about the situation, but the alternative, unfortunately, is far worse. The people in Ukraine/Moldova etc. will go deeper into poverty, and people in the west will have to contend with sky-high inflation.

One reason for poverty is because active people are working in foreign countries.

Isn't the point of this change to give farm workers (who like bus drivers, retail workers, etc barely make ends meet) the ability to cover their basic needs more easily. If we could implement this across all low-paid jobs, I would more than happily pay a greater proportion of my own salary on these goods.

Things already are expensive and with all the automation the salaries make up a crazy tiny amount of it.

have you read the article?

Asparagus are pretty labor intense. Apparently last year NL markets forced the price down to half of what it costs to grow them while prices in the store stay the same.[1]

Say a kilo of asparagus costs 6 euro in the store and has about 16 spears.[2] Say field work in pays 12 euro, 32 spears or 2 kg. One employee harvests 30 kg per hour on average.[3]

2 kg worth of pay for the worker and 15 kg vanished into the market? 40 cents of the 6 euro goes to the field worker which is a lot!

I would love to pay 6.40 for my asparagus if they raise the pay to 24 euro.

I would also quit my job and go work there.

(In Spain the asparagus might be cheaper, have more spears in a kg, people earn 3 euro per hour and they might be less productive. It's hard to calculate from here)

[1] - https://www.1limburg.nl/prijs-asperges-dramatisch-laag-helft...

[2] - https://www.ah.nl/producten/product/wi99045/ah-asperges-wit

[3] - http://www.engelsmachines.nl/EN

The free variable that consumes all available spending money tends to be rent. If food prices go up, I'd expect real estate prices to stop growing so fast. It would be a welcome change.

Tomatoes are not very expensive to begin with. While rents have gone up significantly, food hasn't as much. People spend a much smaller proportion of their income for groceries nowadays than a few decades ago. Maybe this will change.

Related, tfw you pay the one remaining person running Prime Now deliveries a $100 tip in the hopes that they keep working because there's fucking nobody left even though Amazon said it'll pay associates an extra $2/hour. xDD

The labor during harvest is significant, but not that significant. Even at a 40% hike for harvest labor costs, you wouldn't see a 40% increase in price. And it would actually be good for the local economy, but bad for the workers from Eastern Europe, they depend on harvest season.

Numbers I've read is that farm labour accounts for ~10% of retail food cost for fruits.

https://www.prb.org/usfarmworkersfoodprices/

If that doubles because they have to pay local labour rates, the price would go up 10%. Possibly less if it just eats into the margins through the rest of the chain.

We might also see a shift toward less laborious foods, which is fine by me.

You realise such transitions take crop cycles - if the current crops fail because lack of labour and it leads to a food shortage food prices will go through the roof.

...and not to mention everything is interconnected in an economy. If food prices rise by x%, there is a cascade effect on the prices of everything, not just groceries.

It frequently goes the other way. If people are spending more on food that lowers the demand for services which thus lowers those services costs. Housing for example is limited by people’s ability to pay for it, with clear long term trends showing an inverse relationship between housing costs and food costs.

PS: In the short term inflation and deflation can be caused by a huge range of effects, but in the long term it’s bound by government spending and taxation.

Farming doesn't strike me as high margin. This increase in costs could send many farmers out of business. That will push up food prices.

Seems unlikely, the operations would probably just be consolidated with another agribusiness company. "Farmers" are something of an anachronism in most of the agricultural supply chain.

Well, alternatively you’re just paying people slave wages to do this work so you can have cheaper groceries. Don’t forget that.

That’s not just an “Europeans” problem.

It's not going to happen. Europe will handle it better than anyone else if they use their imagination and not loose their minds - https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2017/09/holland-...

The Dutch vegetables are picked by Polish workers though. The problem remains: https://nos.nl/artikel/2328611-wie-gaan-de-asperges-steken-n...

I love how this Fed has got people thinking employment is irrelevant.

Sure, maybe if some people stopped working for a few months, it wouldn't matter to much.

But we still need energy and water and food (and Internet). And most of this requires actual work being done. Not just updating numbers on a spreadsheet.

Yeah but infrastructure is already up. A lot of the work required for upkeep doesn't require as many people as is required to build it out in the first place.

Hopefully this won't lead to any actual starvation? As I understand it, staples like grains and root vegetables can mostly be harvested by machine. While it would be sad to waste fruits and leafy vegetables, I expect you can survive without them for quite a while, especially if you have access to multivitamins.

I don't think there's much risk of serious food shortages. We'll just be eating more staples and fewer exotics and luxury foods. That may mean less meat, so we can use the grains those animals would usually eat to feed us. The economic impact on farmers, as on many other industries will be pretty traumatic and we'll have to decide as society how to deal with all of that, but we'll still be able to eat.

The meat price across the globe has actually seen a U shaped move. A lot of panic slaughter was done when people though that they need to sell their meat before the price crashes through the floor. And before that, there were people capitalising on historically high meat prices because of ASF in China.

Now it is shooting up again across the globe as lockdowns spread to more countries.

Industrial meatpackers are making a killing now thought

Zero risk of starvation. The labor-intensive produce at this time of year (and the next 3 months) is mostly asparagus and strawberries. Grain & corn is all machines. If there’s a second wave, or it takes very long, olives could become a major problem (Nov/Dec). Not for nutrition, but economically and my breakfast routine.

There’s still a lot of fresh fruit in warehouses. Apples, for example, which will last until the end of year.

> olives could become a major problem (Nov/Dec)

I don't think so. My country is a top olive oil exporter and I can tell you that stocks and harvest are at full capacity. Many people (my father included) did not harvest this year because of the low prices. Many exporters are also struggling to sell their produce.

I am up for doing some fruit picking if it can be organized correctly. The strategy of allowing in migrant labour would be a political fiasco.

There is a platform for Germany by the ministry of agriculture organizing it and it seems they had 30k prospects last week: www.daslandhilft.de - one problem as I understood is that this is not all unskilled laborer work, but the there is quite some machinery involved where skilled personal is required.

My experience organizing groups for picking tells me this feel good effort doesn't work.

I'd be interested to hear more about what you think will go wrong. It seems like this is an important problem to solve.

Search for images or videos of asparagus or strawberry picking. Or try holding small bottles of water in each hand, bend over with your arms stretched out, hold for 8 hours.

Also the standards, produce being wasted too much.

<disclaimer: have been volunteering for an org fighting food waste by organizing volunteer pickers>

It's simpler than you think.

1. Commercially viable picking actually requires some training (identify pickable fruits, avoid damaging plants, don't half pick)

2. Farmers (rightfully) don't like people who have no knowledge in growing crops hanging around in their fields. They just do dumb things like drink from irrigation pipes (for some crops irrigation is periodically mixed with fertilizer or pesticides).

3. Volunteers are not trustworthy. You have 30 RSVP-ed and 5 show up. Picking season is usually a narrow window of opportunity.

4. Most importantly - the vast majority of people (from the subset of human race who may volunteer for picking in the first place) really don't know how to work consistently for 8-10 hours. They show up 8 AM (3h too late), then they sit down to drink coffee. Your equation is 10 volunteers ~ 1 professional labourer. And then you have to bring professional labour anyhow to clean after them.

All in all, this doesn't work.

Hmm... So I wonder if this could be ameliorated by:

1. Paying people rather than recruiting volunteers. Presumably the normal pickers would be paid, so there should be funds available for this assuming that the right people can be found.

2. Recruiting and training people well ahead of time. This would give time for at least some level of training. The initial training could be online in video form so as to avoid wasting too much time for those overseeing the process.

3. Some kind of app to facilitate the process. This could potentially allow growers to reach a much wider audience. It could also help with the time-sensitive nature of the problem ("pickers required at X place now").

There are a lot of people out of work at the moment. It seems that diverting some of these people to food picking would be a win for everyone if it could be achieved.

You missed the part where it was always migrant labor that did this work? The article is specifically about the fiasco of not letting in these people. Or, more accurately, these people saying “no thanks” to the prospect of working for minimum wage while risking their lives.

If they can't get picked in time, they can can them, freeze them or dry them. Some will spoil beyond recovery, but not all has to be lost either.

uh you have to pick it before you can preserve it

Overripe fruits don’t sell in Tehran market, but you can do other things with them. So instead of two weeks to pick, you have maybe four, depending on the fruit.

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