03-19-2009, 02:56 PM
Business World Wrote:Spaniards return to farms as unemployment soars
LEPE, Spain- Beneath rows of plastic sheeting that dot a swathe of Andalucian countryside, Spaniards are back at work as seasonal farm labourers, a role they had left to immigrants during a decade-long boom that ended last year.
Allal Nejjaria, a foreman at a 70-hectare (173-acre) strawberry farm operated by the Agromartin cooperative at Lepe near the Portuguese border, said he is hiring locals this year instead of recruiting almost all his seasonal workers abroad as he did in the past."For the 2008 season we hired around 600 seasonal workers, of which 95% were recruited in their home countries," he said as he walked through the dirt paths between the strawberry fields and peach trees.
This year he predicts 40% of all seasonal workers will be locally hired, either Spaniards or foreigners already legally residing in the country.
With the unemployment rate soaring in Spain at one of the fastest paces in Europe, the pattern is being repeated in farms across the Andalucian province of Huelva, one of the world’s largest producers of strawberries."The hiring of workers in their home countries has dropped significantly because we are employing more local workers," said Luisa Cornejo, the local representative of Spain’s Union of Small Farmers.
Of the 60,000 seasonal farm laborers expected to be hired this season in Huelva, only 15,000 will be recruited abroad, half the amount hired outside of Spain last year, according to official data.
The unemployment rate in Andalucia, whose sandy beaches attract millions of sunseekers every year, hit 21.85% at the end of 2008, well above the national rate of 13.9%, the highest rate in the European Union.
"There are a lot of people who worked in construction or in the service sector who want to return to the fields," said Aurora Martinez, a local representative of CCOO, Spain’s largest trade union confederation.
Jacobo Palanco, a 23-year-old father, is one of them. He began working in construction when he was just 16 and even set up his own firm. But now that construction jobs have tried up, toiling in the Andalucian countryside has become an attractive option."Things became difficult at the end of last year," he said at the packaging workshop of the farm where he is employed with his wife, brother and sister-in-law. — AFP
"Numbers are not part of the real world; they're part of something else."
-Prof. Rolly Panopio, UPLB Math Division
-Prof. Rolly Panopio, UPLB Math Division
