Who harvests gebana oranges?

Farm work regulated in Greece

We've been importing oranges from Greece since 2013 – nearly 26'000 kilos in the first year. " "At the time, we only needed to deliver oranges to gebana during specific weeks," says Raphael Sacher, Chairman of the Board of Directors of our partner Anyfion. "The harvest was not strictly organised."

Since our focus in the beginning was on quality and logistics, neither we nor Anyfion had any direct influence on the harvest or the working conditions of the harvest workers. The family farmers did what all farmers did in Greece, which was to hire day labourers without asking too many questions. 

This changed when Greece introduced a coupon-based payment system for farm workers and casual labourers in 2017. The aim of this system, called Ergosimo (Εργόσημο), is to establish basic regulations for employment in the agricultural sector, simplify payments, protect workers and prevent undeclared work.

Here's a simple explanation of how it works: The farmer buys the coupons from the post office or his or her bank (online or at a branch) and fills out the workers' names and national insurance numbers. The coupons are handed out to the workers once the work is completed. The workers then take the coupon to the post office or bank and receive their wages minus social security contributions (10 per cent). This can also be done online.  

Even the best system can be bypassed

Although the system was set up with good intentions, it has been and continues to be abused. For one thing, it only works for workers with national insurance numbers. Undocumented migrants working illegally don't have any. They get around this by having one person with a national insurance number use a coupon to collect the money for an entire group of harvest workers. It is unclear how the money acquired in this way is distributed. 

Given this lack of transparency, Anyfion launched an initial trial with its own group of harvest workers in 2019. Instead of relying on family farmers to recruit farm workers, Anyfion's group was sent from one farm to the next for the harvest. An external group leader managed and coordinated the group, and the workers continued to be paid by the family farmers who employed them. However, day labourers continued to be hired alongside this group, depending on the harvest situation. 

The work is too hard for local workers

A year later, Anyfion went a step further by hiring a harvesting group. Anyfion still paid these workers by the day but took charge of the coordination. The aim of this approach was to assume more control, but it was suspended after two weeks.

"Our biggest challenge was recruitment, given that the number of migrant workers coming to Greece has declined," says Raphael Sacher. "We tried using locals, but they weren't up to the physically demanding work and couldn't perform at the required level."

The core issue is that the wages in Greek agriculture are lower than in other countries, such as Germany or Italy, making it unattractive to European labourers. This is partly due to the fact that Greece mainly exports to the Balkan countries. 

As a result, they went back to relying on groups coordinated by external group leaders.

In 2020, we decided that one of our priorities for Greece was to work with Anyfion on creating better conditions for harvest workers. Since then, conditions have been steadily improving each year: better contracts, more permanent jobs instead of day labourers and improved oversight of the housing situation, food provision, possible exploitation and illegal practices.