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Borders closed due to the coronavirus mean Norwegian farmers are short of manpower. Now some are considering abandoning the strawberry season.
In a few months strawberries will be ripe, but strawberry producers are struggling to get the labor needed to harvest them.
- I tried to recruit Norwegian workers, but few signed up. If there are no more takers, then I have so few pickers that I think to give up strawberries this year, says producer Einar Glesne
Together with his son Tor Gunnar Bjøre, they produce 150 tonnes of strawberries in Krødsherad each summer, but this year large parts of the crop could go to waste if there is not enough manpower.
- The Norwegians are here maybe three or four days, and then they say that the work is too hard, so they don't bother and quit. They get money from Nav anyway. Foreigners are here to earn and get paid well if they are productive, says Glesne.
– Young people can choose
Nav says that one of the challenges for inexperienced agricultural workers is to practice piecework.
– In some cases, unemployment benefits may be higher than the wages that new workers will receive from food producers. Your final salary then depends on how much you produce. Not everyone can produce enough to achieve minimum wage or the level of unemployment benefits. Says Ingar Heum, director of service development at Nav Vestre Viken.
Wrong thinking
Nils Kristen Sandtrøen, the Labor Party's spokesman for agricultural policy, believes it is a mistake, as some strawberry growers say, that people do not bother working in the strawberry field because they are getting money from Nav anyway.
- As a rule, 17-year-olds in high school have nothing to do with Nav. They don't get any money from there.
Sandtrøen believes the problem is that the government is not allowing Nav to recruit high school students.
- This creates a strange situation in which several thousand young people now need summer jobs. Agriculture needs several thousand people to work this summer. At the same time, no one takes the overall responsibility for the obvious task of combining them in the right way, says agricultural policy spokesman Aps. to NTB.
