Meanwhile, in Sussex, 150 tonnes of lettuce have had to remain uncut in the past few weeks; during the summer eight tonnes of Class One Scottish strawberries went unpicked; and at Haygrove, a major soft-fruit farm near Ledbury, Herefordshire, 87,000 punnets of raspberries have just been written off through lack of manpower.
There is no such thing as a Puerto Rican visa. Puerto Rico is part of the United States and if a visa is needed by a visitor it will be a US visa.
Goncalo Roxo, of Portugal-based Your Property Advisor, said he had warned his clients against trying to speed up the process due to the risk from bureaucratic delays. ($1 = 0.9310 euros) (Reporting by Catarina Demony; Additional reporting by Patricia Rua; Editing by Andrei Khalip and Alison Williams)
There are several reasons for this, and they vary depending on who you speak to. Alexandru Barbacaru is director of Bucharest-based Est-Vest Services, an employment agency which supplies British farms with temporary workers.
The fall in the value of the pound — largely caused by uncertainty over Brexit — is another important factor. Romanians still willing to travel abroad for work increasingly prefer other European countries, particularly Germany, which has introduced incentives such as tax-breaks to entice Eastern European farm labourers.
Perhaps so. Yet our arable farms need 70,000 overseas casual workers each year to maintain full productivity, and given the improving fortunes of citizens in EU nations such as Romania, they are highly unlikely to come here in such great numbers ever again. What, then, can be done?
In January, 93 golden visas were issued, a 45% drop compared to December, but the number went up again in February, when 130 were handed out, mainly to Chinese, U.S. and Turkish investors, according to border agency data.
While the data shows a jump in applications, the process can take months so it is not immediately clear whether the numbers are a reflection of the government's announcement, which was first floated in November.
They are demanding that the Government grants immediate entry to the 70,000 workers they need so as to compete with the multinational farming giants that have colonised great swathes of South America and Africa, and are intent on flooding Britain's supermarkets.
This is the season for gathering blueberries and French beans, however, and on a golden October day the rolling hills would ordinarily teem with legions of pickers — almost all migrant workers from Eastern Europe, these days — filling plastic crates.
Critics claim this was done to show she was tough on immigration — apparently ignoring the fact that seasonal workers stay in Britain for only a few months (during which they pay taxes and National Insurance) and do not even count towards the Government's own migration figures.
If you adored this short article and you would such as to receive additional information regarding investgoldenvisa kindly visit our webpage. His office did not immediately reply to a request for comment. Costa has previously said there was no justification to keep the scheme because it had fulfilled the role it had been intended to fulfil, without elaborating.
However, Eastern Europeans had a very different mind-set. Desperate to escape low-paid jobs and better themselves and their families, they were perfectly prepared to slog all day, in wind and rain and cloying mud.
"As soon as you put a deadline on something, it gets people rushing," Nuri Katz from another advisers, Apex Capital Partners, told Reuters. "There's absolutely nothing as good as a deadline in this business."
As part of a package to address the housing crisis as rents also soar, Portugal's premier Antonio Costa announced last month the intention to scrap the scheme. The measure is under public consultation until next Friday.
LISBON, March 14 (Reuters) - Portugal's plan to end its golden visa scheme for investors, yet to be officially approved, has led to a rush in applications according to advisory firms who have criticised the plan as populist.
The scheme, aimed at non-EU nationals ready to invest in Portugal, has attracted 6.8 billion euros ($7.30 billion) since its launch in 2012, with the bulk of the money going into real estate. Successful applicants are then given residency rights.
It has led to the arrival of 1,250 students from university agriculture courses in Russia, Moldova and Ukraine, to be followed by others, from Georgia, Belarus and Barbados. However, the farmers I spoke to dismiss this gesture as a 'drop in the ocean'.
To allow them to gain temporary work visas, the Government would need to reinstate the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Scheme — axed, many will say with ill-thought haste, in 2013, by then Home Secretary Theresa May.
By the early 2000s, however, casual farm labour had changed radically. As one Romanian farmworker told me last week, pickers can walk 20km in an eight-hour shift, after which their backs ache from constant stooping.
'We'd send a ten-tonne stock-lorry around the estates, and they'd clamber in the back and spend the day working in the fields. Some would bring their babies in prams, leaving them beside the fields, and older children might play in the hills,' he smiled.
There is no such thing as a Puerto Rican visa. Puerto Rico is part of the United States and if a visa is needed by a visitor it will be a US visa.
Goncalo Roxo, of Portugal-based Your Property Advisor, said he had warned his clients against trying to speed up the process due to the risk from bureaucratic delays. ($1 = 0.9310 euros) (Reporting by Catarina Demony; Additional reporting by Patricia Rua; Editing by Andrei Khalip and Alison Williams)
There are several reasons for this, and they vary depending on who you speak to. Alexandru Barbacaru is director of Bucharest-based Est-Vest Services, an employment agency which supplies British farms with temporary workers.
The fall in the value of the pound — largely caused by uncertainty over Brexit — is another important factor. Romanians still willing to travel abroad for work increasingly prefer other European countries, particularly Germany, which has introduced incentives such as tax-breaks to entice Eastern European farm labourers.
Perhaps so. Yet our arable farms need 70,000 overseas casual workers each year to maintain full productivity, and given the improving fortunes of citizens in EU nations such as Romania, they are highly unlikely to come here in such great numbers ever again. What, then, can be done?
In January, 93 golden visas were issued, a 45% drop compared to December, but the number went up again in February, when 130 were handed out, mainly to Chinese, U.S. and Turkish investors, according to border agency data.
While the data shows a jump in applications, the process can take months so it is not immediately clear whether the numbers are a reflection of the government's announcement, which was first floated in November.
They are demanding that the Government grants immediate entry to the 70,000 workers they need so as to compete with the multinational farming giants that have colonised great swathes of South America and Africa, and are intent on flooding Britain's supermarkets.
This is the season for gathering blueberries and French beans, however, and on a golden October day the rolling hills would ordinarily teem with legions of pickers — almost all migrant workers from Eastern Europe, these days — filling plastic crates.
Critics claim this was done to show she was tough on immigration — apparently ignoring the fact that seasonal workers stay in Britain for only a few months (during which they pay taxes and National Insurance) and do not even count towards the Government's own migration figures.
If you adored this short article and you would such as to receive additional information regarding investgoldenvisa kindly visit our webpage. His office did not immediately reply to a request for comment. Costa has previously said there was no justification to keep the scheme because it had fulfilled the role it had been intended to fulfil, without elaborating.
However, Eastern Europeans had a very different mind-set. Desperate to escape low-paid jobs and better themselves and their families, they were perfectly prepared to slog all day, in wind and rain and cloying mud.
"As soon as you put a deadline on something, it gets people rushing," Nuri Katz from another advisers, Apex Capital Partners, told Reuters. "There's absolutely nothing as good as a deadline in this business."
As part of a package to address the housing crisis as rents also soar, Portugal's premier Antonio Costa announced last month the intention to scrap the scheme. The measure is under public consultation until next Friday.
LISBON, March 14 (Reuters) - Portugal's plan to end its golden visa scheme for investors, yet to be officially approved, has led to a rush in applications according to advisory firms who have criticised the plan as populist.
The scheme, aimed at non-EU nationals ready to invest in Portugal, has attracted 6.8 billion euros ($7.30 billion) since its launch in 2012, with the bulk of the money going into real estate. Successful applicants are then given residency rights.It has led to the arrival of 1,250 students from university agriculture courses in Russia, Moldova and Ukraine, to be followed by others, from Georgia, Belarus and Barbados. However, the farmers I spoke to dismiss this gesture as a 'drop in the ocean'.
To allow them to gain temporary work visas, the Government would need to reinstate the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Scheme — axed, many will say with ill-thought haste, in 2013, by then Home Secretary Theresa May.
By the early 2000s, however, casual farm labour had changed radically. As one Romanian farmworker told me last week, pickers can walk 20km in an eight-hour shift, after which their backs ache from constant stooping.
'We'd send a ten-tonne stock-lorry around the estates, and they'd clamber in the back and spend the day working in the fields. Some would bring their babies in prams, leaving them beside the fields, and older children might play in the hills,' he smiled.