Workers from the Philippines have been recruited to work on Jersey farms to fill the gap left in the wake of Brexit, as Polish and Romanian worker abandoned the island after the EU referendum.
Jersey growers, who feared that their Jersey Royal potatoes would be left to rot in the fields, now claim the void has finally been filled by Filipino workers who were 'keeping the farming industry going' on the Channel Island.
Peter Le Maistre, president of the Jersey Farmers Union, explained that the impact of Brexit had led to more farm workers being recruited from further away: 'Since the Brexit vote in 2016 the economy has improved significantly in Poland compared to when they first came to work in Jersey around 2001. So it was getting more and more difficult to find workers from Eastern Europe. A couple of years ago we started to look around for another source of labour.'
Le Maistre said that a contact of the union in Jersey had heard of Filipino workers being employed through an agency in Scotland and Northern Ireland. A total of 18 workers were recruited in February 2020 on a nine-month contract.
'By the end of this month we'll have already got 35 Filipino workers in and another 15 are coming by the end of this week. So we will have 50 Filipino workers across farms in Jersey for 2021,” he told dailymail.co.uk.
Photo source: Dreamstime.com
