Benefits of seasonal agricultural workers program highlighted

Friday, June 6, 2014

by SUSAN MANN

About 16,000 workers from Mexico and the Caribbean will be participating in the Seasonal Agricultural Workers program in Ontario this year.

Ken Forth, president of the Foreign Agricultural Resource Management Services (FARMS), says there are 16,800 job placements for Ontario. As of last Friday, there were 11,000 workers already in the province but currently as some workers arrive others, who have been here since Jan. 1, will be returning home by the end of June. “At this time of year they start coming and going,” he says.

Of the 16,000 workers, between 80 and 85 per cent are returning employees and most go back to the same farms they were on in previous years. Forth says one worker has returned to his farm as part of the program for the past 30 years.

FARMS, which takes care of administration and travel arrangements for the program, issued a press release June 3 outlining the benefits of the program, including that workers earn five times more working as part of the program in Canada than they do in their own countries. That income enables them to improve their families’ standard of living, educate their children and buy businesses and farms in their own countries.

The program, which has been in place since 1966, also benefits Ontario farmers and the province’s economy. Two jobs are created for Canadians in the agri-food industry for every seasonal agriculture worker employed through the program, the release says.

The participating countries are Mexico, Jamaica, Barbados, Trinidad/Tobago and the Eastern Caribbean states. The program was established in 1966 in response to a critical shortage of available and suitable local Canadian agricultural workers. Workers are hired from participating countries only after farmers demonstrate they can’t find local Canadian employees to fill vacancies.

The 48-year-old program has come under heavy criticism over the years from unions and social justice groups and that’s partly why FARMS decided to hire a public relations firm two years ago that issues about five press releases a year outlining the positive attributes of the program.

“We tell people the truth all the time and we tell our story,” Forth notes. BF