Who harvests gebana oranges?

A second house for a bigger team in the 2025/2026 season

In the 2024/2025 season, Anyfion employed six men from Syria under fixed contracts for the first time. After the season ended, the company offered them the chance to stay on permanently and work for its agricultural services department outside the harvest season. This department offers family farmers various services, such as tree and field maintenance. Two of the six men accepted the offer and have been working at Anyfion ever since.

In the 2025/2026 season, both of them trained the next group of harvest workers. As in the pilot project (see below), they came from refugee camps and are originally from Syria, Yemen, Morocco and South Sudan. In addition, Anyfion was able to recruit some local workers in the region who were interested in a seasonal contract with a fixed wage. In total, Anyfion ran the season with eight of its own harvest workers – deliberately not more. "We wanted to make sure everything ran smoothly, and to learn from this first full year before scaling further," says managing director Giorgos Stergiou.

Anyfion renovated a second house for the bigger team. All eight lived under the same conditions as before: free accommodation, internet access and a bicycle for personal errands.

Of course, these eight could not bring in the entire harvest, and Anyfion continued to rely on external groups. Together with the local Greek team, the eight harvested around 290 tonnes of oranges – about 10 percent of the total orange harvest of roughly 2.75 million kilos.

Refugees work in the orange groves

In the 2024/2025 season, our partner Anyfion employed its own harvest workers on a seasonal contract with a fixed wage for the first time. To do so, the local team developed a pilot project together with the NGO Metadrasi and the recruitment agency Workland to legally employ undocumented migrants. Metadrasi handled recruitment in the refugee camps, while Workland managed the administrative formalities.

With the support of both organisations, Anyfion was able to employ six men from Syria for the 2024/25 season.

The hiring process took about one month and a half. The biggest hurdles were obtaining valid documents and opening bank accounts for the refugees. But in the end, everything worked out. Their employment conditions were as follows:

• Seasonal contract with a 6-day week and fixed working hours
• Fixed monthly wage including social security and health insurance
• Free work clothes
• Free accommodation in a house newly renovated by Anyfion
• Free internet access in the house
• Bicycle for excursions or shopping
• Free Greek lessons, if they want them

Although these conditions sound obvious, they are revolutionary for Greece and Europe. This especially applies to the fixed seasonal contract with a fixed wage, as Raphael Sacher, Anyfion’s Chairman of the Board, points out. “No other company in the industry offers that.”

In the 2024/2025 season, the six men harvested just under 10 percent of the roughly 1.5 million kilos of oranges we shipped that season. The rest was harvested mainly by groups coordinated by Anyfion, who are not permanently employed but are paid daily via coupons directly by the family farmers.

Greece formalises farm labour

We have been importing oranges from Greece since 2013 – just under 26,000 kilos in the first year. “Back then, we only had to deliver oranges to gebana on certain weeks,” says Raphael Sacher, Chairman of the Board of our partner Anyfion. “The harvest wasn’t tightly organised.”

In those early years, our focus was on quality and logistics, so neither we nor Anyfion had any direct influence on the harvest or the working conditions of the harvest workers. The family farmers did what every farmer in Greece did: hire workers daily without asking too many questions.

That changed when Greece introduced a coupon-based payment system for agricultural and casual workers in 2017. The system is called Ergosimo (Εργόσημο) and is designed to establish basic rules for employment in agriculture, simplify payments, protect workers and prevent undeclared work.

In short, this is how it works: the farmer buys the coupons from the post office or their bank – online or in a branch – enters the worker’s name and social security number, and hands them over once the work is done. Workers then take the coupon to the post office or bank – this can also be done online – and receive their wage minus social security contributions (10 percent).

Even the best system can be circumvented

Despite good intentions, this system has been and continues to be open to abuse. Of course, it only works if a worker has a social security number. Undocumented workers – migrants without papers – don't have one. The "solution" is that one person with a social security number collects the coupon payment for the whole group of harvest workers. How the money is then divided up among the group remains unclear.

Because of this lack of transparency, Anyfion launched a first trial in 2019 with its own group of harvest workers. Instead of the family farmers recruiting the workers themselves, this group moved from farm to farm to harvest. An external group leader led and coordinated the group, while the workers continued to be paid by the family farmers they worked for. Alongside this group, additional day labourers were still hired daily as needed, depending on the harvest situation.

The work is too demanding for local workers

A year later, Anyfion wanted to develop the system further by employing a harvest group itself. These workers were still paid by Anyfion daily, but the company coordinated everything itself. This approach was meant to bring more control, but had to be abandoned again after two weeks.

"Our biggest challenge here was recruitment, because hardly any migrant workers come to Greece any more," says Raphael Sacher. "So we tried it with local workers, but they weren't up to the physically demanding work and didn't deliver the performance required."

The underlying problem: Greek agriculture is no longer attractive enough for European workers, as wages are lower than in Germany or Italy, for example. This is partly because Greece mainly exports to the Balkan states. So, it was a step back to groups coordinated by external group leaders.

So it was a step back to groups coordinated by external group leaders.

In 2020, together with Anyfion, we defined improving the situation of harvest workers as one of our priorities for Greece. Since then, we have moved closer to our goal every year: better contracts, as many permanent positions as possible instead of day labourers, and more oversight of the housing situation, food provision, and possible exploitation or illegal practices.