Australia produces enough food for 75 million people, according to David Littleproud, Minister for Agriculture, Drought and Emergency Management, though much of it is exported. As coronavirus fears have led to panic buying and less air freight, politicians are reminding us that our food supply is not in danger. In a new article published in The Guardian, Dr Victoria Stead examines the truth behind such statements and what border closures and social distancing mean for the thousands of migrant and seasonal workers that pick and pack Australia’s fresh produce.

“In horticulture, the challenges are significant. The industry is in the middle of the harvest season, a critical point in the production cycle when demands for labour are at their peak. Temporary migrant and local seasonal workers are picking fruit, harvesting vegetables, and sorting and packing crops in packing sheds across the country,” Dr Stead writes.

The Australian Government has said it will look at extending visas for labourers in this industry, but, as Dr Stead writes, the answer is likely not so simple.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE.

Dr Victoria Stead is an anthropologist whose work also has an interdisciplinary focus, engaging cognate areas of politics, geography, development studies, history, and postcolonial studies. Her current research coheres around two key areas of interest and activity. The first of these engages themes of conflict, memory, landscape and development in relation to the legacies of the Second World War in Papua New Guinea, including the growth of war tourism in the region surrounding the Kokoda Track. The second focuses on labour in the Australian horticultural industry, with a geographical focus on the Shepparton region in northern Victoria. Discourses and practices relating to horticultural labour are strongly inflected with considerations of race and class, and have complex histories that are also bound up with Australia’s colonial history. Pacific Islanders and East Timorese are amongst those who travel to the area to work as fruit pickers, and their experiences intersect with the labour experiences of Indigenous communities, as well as migrants and refugees from Asia and the Middle East, European backpackers, and an increasingly marginalised White local underclass. Connecting these two strands of research activity is a focus on the Australia-Pacific region, a concern with contemporary postcolonialism and the reverberations of the past in the present, and an empirical and theoretical attention to land and landscape.