Migrant work and the future of food cultivation in the Netherlands

Abstract                          

The contrast between Dutch agriculture’s highly internationalized trade and labour force and the invisibility of migrant workers in discourses about the sector’s future is one of the contradictions characterizing the sector. This essay engages with this contradiction by putting migrant workers centre-stage in reflections on the future of food cultivation in the Netherlands. The essay outlines the scope and conditions of migrant work in contemporary agriculture in the Netherlands and how national and EU regulation shape the ‘regulated precarity’ that migrant farmworkers experience. Central and East European (CEE) migrants form the backbone of Dutch food cultivation, most of whom are employed indirectly through employment agencies with limited social rights. The essay argues that the widespread invisibilisation of migrant farmworkers in statistics, policy and media discourses, their negative framing as competitors for housing and the legally sanctioned insecurity of their working and living conditions are mechanisms that underpin the devaluation of food and of the labour involved in its cultivation and processing.
This implies that a sustainable future of migrant work in Dutch food cultivation involves greater recognition of the essential value of food, to be matched by dignified conditions for those involved in its production. Different actors in the agri-food chain should support the required shifts of power, resources, and recognition towards migrant farmworkers: State regulation can ensure retailers’ accountability for labour conditions along this chain and address the oligopoly power inherent in the agri-food chain’s current ‘supermarket model’. Labour regulation can guarantee the equal treatment of agency and directly employed workers, and fiscal policy offers tools to encourage a revaluation of food and those who produce it. As the example of the Fair Food Program in the United States demonstrates, market-based mechanisms, too, have potential to effectively redistribute value from retailers to migrant workers. Last but not least, trade unions have a key role in helping to visibilise migrant workers’ central role in food production and to amplify their voice. The ongoing fierce debate about the future of food production in the Netherlands offers a window of opportunity for change towards a sustainable future of migrant work in the agri-food chain. It should be seized by the Dutch Government and other actors in the agri-food chain alike. 

Keywords

Agri-food chain, migrant work, Netherlands, sustainability.

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