‘We need to stay alive’: ethnicisation and shortage of farm labour in Hungary

ABSTRACT

This article fills a gap in the international academic literature, which has little to say on agricultural labour in Central and Eastern European countries and especially Hungary. The paper reveals factors that determine the ethnicisation and problematic availability of seasonal agricultural labourers in Hungary, made up mainly, but not exclusively of people of Roma ethnicity, largely Ukrainian or Romanian citizens from Hungarian minorities in Trans-Carpathia or Transylvania. The flexible oscillation of low-skilled labour across different economic sectors explains why a shortage peaked between 2016 and 2019 when, in addition to agriculture, the local states (through public works programmes) and industry (as post-crisis growth returned) competed for the same labour. The paper discusses findings from qualitative research, undertaken in an inner peripheral rural region, portraying the strategies and practices of local fruit-growing farmers to obtain labour, as well as diversify and mechanise. The study illustrates the mutual dependency of farmers and the local manual workforce. It is likely, however, that this mutuality will not last long: differentiation in farm structure will continue, some small orchards will disappear, large ones will become stronger and larger, and in doing so will not be able to avoid opting for migrant labour.

KEYWORDS:

• Agricultural labour
• labour shortage
• ethnicisation
• Hungary

Acknowledgements

We are thankful for the financial support provided by the National Research, Development and Innovation Office of Hungary in the framework of grant number K132975. We are also grateful to our interview partners for the time they spent with us and for trusting us, and we are indebted to the two anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions that helped improve the article. We would like to thank Lorna Philip and Margaret Currie, guest editors of this theme section, for their exceptional assistance and support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The reason for highlighting this detail here is that the dominant land-use on our study area is fruit farming.

2 Koós’s study processes the ’Joint Administrative Panel Database’ which is accessible via the database of the Centre for Economic and Regional Studies. The database contains data on the labour market situation of half the Hungarian population at 180 monthly time intervals across 15 years. The sample brings together data on health (National Health Insurance Fund), education (Education Office), labour market and unemployment (Hungarian State Treasury, Ministry of Finance and the National Tax and Customs Office).

3 This also had the effect of removing Romainans from the statistic because EU statistics do not register intra-EU migration.

4 CVI. Act on Public Works.

5 LXXV. Act on Simplified Employment, 2010. Administration under this scheme is easy: a text message to the regional government office in the morning suffices. Wage levels are low, equivalent to less than 2 euros per day per person until January 2023. From January, 2023 wages are adjusted to the minimum wage.

6 Each interviewee signed a form before the start of the interview. The form was constructed according to the EU General Data Protection Regulation rules; the signature confirmed the interviewee’s consent regarding recording and use of data.

7 The programme combined practice-oriented vocational training with mentoring and personal coaching. Farmers received wage subsidies for two years to employ school-leavers, long-term unemployed mostly Roma. In the end, 16 out of 20 participants earned their certificates and worked on the plantations; some continued to be employed after the programme ended, while others found jobs outside agriculture (Kabai, 2011; Keller, Rácz, et al., 2016).

8 We have been informed that another large-scale farmer in Mucsfa also relies on migrant labour for harvest, but he refused to be interviewed when we approached him.

9 Despite deserving of criticism (Keller, Kovács, et al., 2016), public work programmes represented the state’s only sound labour market measure which permitted the Roma poor to take a step forward in terms of regaining membership of society through relatively long-term employment (G. Fekete, 2015).

10 It is problematic that in many publications, authors do not distinguish between Central and East European countries, let alone different ethnic groups within a single country.

Additional information

Funding

Our research project titled ‘Farm Types, Challenges, Directions of Adaptation and their impact on the Hungarian Countryside’ is funded by the NKFIH (National Research, Development and Innovation Office). Project number: K 132 975.