Do we really want our food to be ‘harvested by hand’?

In my local supermarket, there are a whole range of items such as sugar snap peas from China and butternut squash from Guatemala whose labels boast in huge letters that they were “harvested by hand”. Every time I walk down that aisle, the labels get under my skin.

I’ve been trying to work out why they bother me. I’m all for acknowledging the role of human labour, especially in the production processes for goods or services that people might assume have been fully automated by now. There are plenty of instances where the crucial role played by humans is hidden or overlooked, such as the low-paid workers who train artificial intelligence systems or moderate content on social media. And as AI begins to be used in places such as Hollywood and newsrooms, it’s going to be more important than ever for customers to be given clear information about the respective roles in production played by humans and machines.

But even at the best of times, harvesting fruit and vegetables by hand is physically tough and repetitive work. Gone are the days when students might do it casually for a summer, setting their own pace and enjoying the sun. When the UK appealed for Britons to work on farms in the pandemic year of 2020 to help bring in the harvest, few managed to stick it out. One supplier placed 450 people on farms, of whom only 4 per cent were still on assignment by the end of the season.

What’s wrong with turning the work over to machines? One could argue that automation is exactly what the sector needs, especially in countries like the UK, which domestic labour shortages have left reliant on imports or seasonal migrant workers brought in on temporary visas who can be vulnerable to exploitation by recruitment agents in their home countries.

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Last year, for example, the number of Nepalese workers arriving in Britain through the government’s seasonal worker visa scheme more than quadrupled to 2,472, but this year farmers stopped recruiting workers from there after warnings they were being charged excessive recruitment fees by agents in Nepal. “Given the circumstances we’re in now, we desperately need more automation in horticultural production – it’s got to be better than importing labour from halfway across the world with all of the issues that entails,” says Martin Buttle, who leads on “better work” at CCLA Investment Management.

It could be a long wait, though. A recent government-initiated review into automation in UK horticulture found that a number of barriers dissuaded farmers from investing in technology, including tight margins and a lack of certainty about their future income. The report said some of the most labour-saving developments might also need government help to emerge from the “valley of death” – the phase between academia and commercialisation when innovations can founder for lack of funding. The report predicted that “autonomous selective harvesting” won’t be commercially available until at least 2030 if left to market forces.

The other thing that bothers me about those “harvested by hand” labels is that they don’t give the customer enough information. If you are going to make a point about the use of human labour, shouldn’t you also provide some detail of the pay and conditions under which those people worked?

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I emailed the Co-op, the supermarket in question, some photos of Spanish courgettes, Guatemalan butternut squash and Chinese sugar snap peas labelled “harvested by hand” to ask for information about their respective suppliers. The Co-op didn’t give me any supplier details, but it sent a statement which says: “Harvested by Hand is printed on a small number of fresh products to inform customers that the product has not been damaged when harvested. Looking after the people in our supply chain who harvest these vegetables is always a priority and we have a leading, active role in industry groups, established to strengthen due diligence and help protect worker safety, welfare and working conditions.”

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Co-op is also a member of the Ethical Trading Initiative, which told me the supermarket was “active” in initiatives to improve working conditions in supply chains and “compares well with others in terms of transparency”.

That said, if the use of human labour is to become a marketing plus point in an age of increased automation, I think there should be some new ground rules. No boasting about the work of human hands unless you give the customer some more information about them. If you make the hands visible, but the rest of the person stays invisible, it somehow feels more dehumanising than not mentioning them at all. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2023