Fruit and vegetables – Eating Research

A Rotten Deal: Tomato Pickers and Online Shopping

The ‘click’ of an on-line shop allows shoppers to order in a new way, but has moved the consumer one step further away from the farmers and workers who grow and harvest food. Where do these orders end up? How do they connect to the experiences and struggles of farm workers who are ever more invisible at the other end of long supply chains?

I ask this question in relation to one crop, a food that served as a juicy red star of early supermarket adverts on the side of new inner city delivery vans: the cherry tomato. For my PhD fieldwork I learned two languages (French and Moroccan Arabic), and with a working, but far from perfect, knowledge of each, travelled to Southern Morocco where I lived alongside workers who respond to the demands of our daily, weekly or monthly orders for fresh food. These workers, the majority of whom are poor Moroccan women who are internal migrants to the region, plant, pick and pack the majority of tomatoes that are exported to Europe. In a recently published article based on this study, I explore the time imperatives of this export-orientated network bringing us the rosy fruit, at the click of an online order.

The notion of the ‘order’ is interesting. While most conversation in the region of Chtouka Ait Baha in Southern Morocco was in Arabic, certain words, as is the tradition in Moroccan Arabic, remained in French. ‘Demand’ was one of these; ‘le demand’ was the French for ‘order’. This mechanism of connection with the rich world, mediated via algorithms and computer systems in which fresh produce is bought and sold, is not negotiated, but ‘ordered’, or ‘demanded’. The orders are demanded in a just-in-time system where time connections that link us through this system exert daily, yearly and lifelong pressures upon workers in enclaves of production.

The impacts on working conditions follow the demand pressures. Hours of work are established by the requirements of freshness of the crops and the orders from retailers and intermediaries. For example, tomatoes should not stay in storage for more than two days. Therefore, if an order is not complete, workers must stay an extra two hours, perhaps late into the night. This is an inconvenience in any context, but a dangerous one where women workers are vulnerable to harassment and are warned not to be in the streets after dark. I met many frightened women returning from the late shift.

Needed but not valued

Agricultural workers have recently been recognised as ‘essential’. Yet, the way their work is valued remains unchanged. If anything, it has become more hidden with fewer consumers in shops looking closely at labels and asking questions. Across the world agricultural workers are undervalued and underpaid, despite being essential.

In Morocco, agricultural workers’ minimum wages provide a benchmark around which actual wages sit at and below. The legal minimum wage for agriculture is significantly lower than for other ‘industrial’ sectors creating an in-built sectoral discrimination. While industrial workers earn between £8-9 per day, agricultural workers’ wages are set between £5-6 per day. This is a fraction of minimum wages in the UK, and still a fraction of the wages of other low-paid agricultural workers in Southern Europe. This makes the reason for an increasing supply of food from Morocco to the UK and Northern Europe, crystal clear. The work is cheap, and this is assumed to be acceptable whatever the social costs.

Nature, social and reproductive time

It is easy to pose the plight of such workers overseas against those working in the UK. Yet, workers in countries like the UK, have perhaps more in common with workers at the end of long supply chains than is often recognised. In the contemporary context, workers in agri-industrial sectors are pulled by the same multiple imperatives of time. They work within both the disciplinary time logics and pressures of what EP Thompson recognised decades ago as nature’s time (weather, seasons and daylight cycles) and industrial time (regulated by clocks, agreed time-frames and integrated markets), as well as what we must recognise today as ‘social reproductive time’; that time involving domestic and care work, as well as the reproduction of society itself through having and raising the children who become the next generation of workers.

What all these undervalued but ‘essential’ food and farm workers have in common is that they must meet and respond to the ‘orders’ and demands of retailers who stimulate, mediate and rearticulate the demands of consumers. Online orders add a little more distance to a system of production in which invisible time pressures are already one of the crucial connections between workers and consumers.

The online order does not typically provide a country of origin on its fresh fruit and vegetables. So, if you choose a packet of tomatoes online, it will say which countries the food might be sourced from, but often not the one that it was actually produced in. Are these really tomatoes from nowhere? If we understood more about contexts of production, it would be easier to build connection with workers and employers, rather than increasing the layers of invisibility and control behind the order.

This blog was originally published in issue 19 of the Futures of Work online magazine. The original link to this blogpiece is here. The image is the Author’s own.

Does it matter that the UK relies on migrant workers to harvest food?

In the recent launch of the new migration research project MigResHub, agricultural labour economist Professor Philip Martin stated that he saw the future of farming in the USA as reliant on ‘machines and migrants, buffered by imports’. This is indeed the direction in which commercial agriculture is going. However, we don’t need to accept this trajectory. It means relegating agricultural work to the bottom of the pile for good and accepting as a given that people don’t want to pick fruit (when they have other options). This is not necessarily true, at least in the UK.

My new project on risk and resilience looks at work in horticulture, where much seasonal labour is required, so I want to focus particularly on the ‘migrants’ part of Martin’s prognosis for the future of the food system. Yet, the dominance of both machines and imports in the food security debate makes them important to comment on too.

Lang reasons that, due to Britain’s imperial past, we are used to assuming that other countries will feed us, but he argues that we should be wary of doing so for security as well as sustainability reasons. As I found in my last project, Moroccan workers producing food for Europe’s imports experience pressures such as low wages, a lack of respect and intense time pressures. Put simply, they face the same patterns of pressures as farmworkers within the UK. A reliance on imports therefore displaces social and environmental challenges to other places.

*A mechanical engineer with an agricultural robot (image: This is Engineering on Flickr)*

Machines have always reduced labour in agriculture, which makes food cheaper but not always better. This direction of travel, spearheaded most recently by proponents of AI and robotics, is at least partially self-propelled by those involved in producing ever bigger and more sophisticated machinery. Huge increases in research funding for automatisation contribute to an industry that has established a narrative of erasure of the majority of workers from agriculture within food systems. (Searching in the UK Research and Innovation Gateway for projects involving the terms ‘robot, agriculture, food and labour’ brings up 1,169 relevant research projects funded in 2019, compared with fewer than five a year between 2000 and 2005.)

The public debate over agriculture and migration has intensified in recent years. While farmers call for large numbers of temporary seasonal workers, nationalist sentiment keeps up pressure for tight restrictions on migration across the board. In addition, discomfort regarding working conditions plays on the conscience of consumers. This mix of concerns appears related to the haste towards robotisation. Government and industry specialists are now charmed by ‘agricultural modernisation’ (robotics and AI) and characterise temporary worker migration as a short-term fix before the mechanical hands are ready to pick. In 2018, Michael Gove re-introduced the UK’s temporary migration programme by saying that ‘… automated harvesting solutions are not universally available and so in the short term, this pilot will support farmers during peak production periods.’ Migration as a short-term fix is a convenient discourse, but insufficient. Not every task is easily mechanised, and while machines work best on large flat lands, the UK has many smaller hilly fields.

Temporary worker permits in agriculture are not new. We could say that the seasonal agricultural workers, who came to Britain at the end of the Second World War, took over from the Women’s Land Army. There is also a longer continuity of drawing on those at the periphery of the workforce for seasonal labour. In earlier times, Irish workers and Travellers were among those who met labour demands at peak times. What is common to all these temporary workers is their position in the labour market, which is low.

The seasonal agricultural workers scheme (SAWS) is the UK’s temporary migration programme; it began as a volunteer scheme after the war and became SAWS in 1990. Access to the EU labour market led to its closure in 2014 as policy makers argued that freedom of movement made SAWS unnecessary. However, this ending turned out to be temporary. Following the Brexit vote in 2016, farmers feared, and began to experience, a lack of access to willing workers. A ‘pilot’ SAWS was launched again in 2018, initially with quotas of just 2,500 workers, which has been increased to 10,000 workers from 2020 onwards. The continuity of demand is clear.

*Migrant workers harvest leeks in Lincolnshire, UK (image: John M on Geograph)*

Rather than just focusing on SAWS or migrant workers we also need to consider agricultural work itself. The prognosis of machines, migrants and imports takes as a given that workers, given full access to a diverse labour market, will not choose to work in agriculture. Yet, could this be more about the agricultural model than any naturalised preference of workers? Intensive production systems are indeed unattractive to many as a career choice, especially if you don’t own the land.

Nevertheless, many people are interested in producing food. In the UK, demand for allotments has quadrupled in recent years, and growing at home boomed under lockdown. This year, record numbers of non-migrants signed up to pick fruit during the COVID-19 pandemic, and while many didn’t end up on the farm, or didn’t last long, this shows an interest in the work. Perhaps for those that dropped out it isn’t them who should be blamed, but rather the system. Some large UK farms are now described as ‘plantations’, with monocultures that require absolute obedience from both nature and worker. Rejecting this kind of workplace regime – which only became dominant after a squeeze on farms from retailers in the 1990s – doesn’t mean people don’t want to grow food at all.

The growing Land Workers Alliance, representing sustainable growers and farmers, is testament to the increasing interest among young people. So too is the LION (Land In Our Names) movement of black people and people of colour gathering to access land for sustainable projects in the UK. These movements are challenging assumptions about who can be a grower, and a farmer. If opportunities are provided for this to become decent and sufficiently paid work, an able, diverse and motivated workforce may just be available.

Does it matter that the UK relies on migrant workers? I think it’s more important that we don’t naturalise the assumption that only migrants do farm work. The ‘Pick for Britain’ campaign set up early in the pandemic had the benefit of reconnecting British people with the idea (and for some the reality) that we too can pick fruit. As people rallied to feed the nation, it’s just possible that the public became more aware of the essential nature of this work. Alongside machines and imports, it’s possible to aspire to a future in which migrants and non-migrants choose jobs that bring in the harvest – and that they are supported to do so.

*‘Urban gardening vegetable harvest crop‘ by Markus Spiske on Flickr*

This post was originally published on the Migration Mobilities Bristol Blog on 1st December 2020.

Table Grapes: A hand-selected future of work

asda van with grapes

The supermarket delivery van that appears as if by magic is driven by a worker. The picture of table grapes, succulently drawing us into the marketing of this retailer, were almost certainly picked by a person, not a machine. Yet machines and artificial intelligence are involved too. Understanding the ways in which humans and machines are placed in relation to one another in the workplace is a complex challenge. Addressing it are social scientists who consider human interactions, critical management scholars who try to understand the organisation of work and finance, and legal specialists who are attempting to establish frameworks for the governance of the present and future of work.

A new working paper published by the University of Bristol’s Faculty Research Group for Perspectives on Work brings scholars from these fields together to ask: what is the future of work? Is it something characteristically different from the past and present? Or is it ultimately just a continuation of workplace dynamics today? Just capitalist relations of production and profit in different dress? In the paper, my colleagues and I do not dispute that shifts are occurring in the organisation and lived experience of work. However, we argue that these shifts are contingent on the present relations between capital, workers, technology and the social and ecological contexts within which work takes place. The future of work is therefore one that we know very well, even if the wolf has changed its clothes.

Our paper takes a broad view of how work has changed, and will change. Many significant changes in recent decades relate to the spatial reorganisation of work. Consider for example that 83 per cent of the world’s manufacturing workforce now live in the Global South. This indicates a tremendous shift in the places and types of jobs available in different regions of the world. Alongside this has occurred perhaps an even greater shift in the world’s working relations as services have become the largest global sector for employment accounting for 51% of workers, overtaking agriculture which now employs just 26.4% of the global population. As recently as the 1990s it was agriculture that was the major employer with services very much behind.

These changes have been accompanied by an overall trend towards urbanisation as, at the turn of the millennium and for the first time ever, more people lived globally in urban rather than rural environments. This broad perspective allows us to consider the changes in work. To begin with, as evidenced by the ever-increasing volumes of global trade, work now increasingly occurs in the context of political and economic relationships that are global in scope.

We are reminded by Noah Zatz and Eileen Boris, that when thinking about ‘work’ what is “at issue is not only what is being done, but also by whom, for whom, and why”. Therefore, as important as thinking about what jobs are around, is to think about who does such jobs for whom. Here, we consider mobility again, but this time not the movements of things through trade, but the mobility of people. Labour markets are fragmented and segregated and who does what often relates to individual and collective histories and status, leading the work of some to be recognised with honorific titles and the work of others to go unrecognised or undervalued.

These abstract questions can be very difficult to engage with and so in the paper we take on two case studies, that of care work and agri-food work. These case studies are ones which are closely associated with the future of work as they involve jobs which are poorly remunerated and can be arduous, as well as often of low-status. Many fall into the category of the so-called ‘3D’ jobs: Dirty, Dangerous and Demeaning. These are also jobs associated with labour migration as high numbers of migrant workers often occupy these roles.

The interesting thing about both care and agri-food work is that there are clear reasons in both cases why the people in these jobs are unlikely to be replaced by ‘robots’ in the short term. In the case of care work, the needs of those being cared for are complex, changeable and require emotional responses from carers – paid or unpaid. Furthermore, care is tied to the places in which those who need to be cared for are based. As captured in the concept of Global Care Chains some of these roles are highly dependent on migrant workers leaving others to care for their own families. These ‘others’ are both workers and family members. So even if there is persistent inequality in the way care jobs are organised, it seems likely that migrant workers and non-migrant workers are likely to continue working side by side in these roles, even if some robotisation also occurs. Whilst it is likely that more tasks may be mechanised, perhaps leading to fewer workers, the fact that people need to be involved at some stage is relatively non-negotiable.

In the case of farm work we recognise that the long history of farming, as in other sectors, has involved the successive replacement of workers for increased mechanisation. However, there are still many tasks in modern food systems that require people. Ironically, like the grapes in the photo above, it is precisely many of the emblematic fruit and vegetables advertised in supermarket adverts as immediately available and fresh, that require careful hand picking. While it is possible to mechanically pick crops such as tomatoes and grapes, this renders the crops good only for processing, such as canning and ketchup for tomatoes. Those delicious looking ‘fresh’ products that draw us into the stores and websites still require hand picking.

A further point to make is that by overemphasising the degree to which ‘everything is done’ by a machine, it can be difficult for workers to gain visibility, good remuneration, as well as respect and status in the labour market. Workers in these sectors are not doing unskilled tasks easily replaceable by machines; they are doing jobs that require skill, dexterity, fast responses to changing conditions as well as complex strategies for negotiating difficult labour markets with often undesirable working hours.

There is a need to re-valorise work and workers, to recognise not just where robots are replacing jobs – their replacement by technology – but also where people in jobs are working under increased pressure or insecurity due to their increased relationship with technology. We understand the common use of the word robots here to really refer to a range of automated systems from computers such as the automated check-out tills to platforms such as Deliveroo. Both of these examples require many people for them to function.

What we mean by ‘work’ – when someone works and does not – is increasingly important in order to value not just the worth of an individual who may not have their work recognised as a traditional ‘full time job’ but also to inform our legal systems and social systems which struggle to keep up with the evolving reality of the present as well as the future of work.

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This piece is based on the Perspectives on Work Faculty Research Group Working Paper #1: The ‘future’ of work? A call for the recognition of continuities in challenges for conceptualising work and its regulation.

The choice of table grapes was inspired by the visiting PhD student Miguel Angel Sanchez who has been based at the University of Bristol as a visiting student from the University of Murcia, Spain, and who is researching quality standards in table grape production.

This post was originally published in the Futures of Work on-line magazine, Issue 4.

Apples

One of my early memories is of waking up, opening the curtains and seeing the large apple tree in our small back garden newly cut down. Now in a relationship with a tree surgeon, perhaps it’s time that I forgive my Dad for choosing to cull the tree. Apparently he did a deal with his mate ‘John the wood’ in the pub. My parents didn’t have the time to deal with the apples, and the tree was apparently overbearing in the garden that my little sister and I played in, so they chose space over apples. Even if I still feel sad about that tree, I appreciate the point about time…

Time is the latest ‘secret ingredient’ of cooking, or the lack of it. A food writer called Jenny Linford recently wrote a popular book making the point loud and clear: the missing ingredient is time. [1] Flavours take time, fermentation takes time, even fast reactions take time to practise and to perfect. The average British person now spends only 31 minutes a day cooking, down from an hour in the 1980s. [2] So, that means that meals need to be ready to go, and the supermarkets are meeting that need with not just ready meals, but also cooking kits, where the lettuce is already chopped, the carrots are already peeled, the meat is sliced, and the rice is portioned up.

If the time dedicated to cooking is lacking, then this is just the tip of the time iceberg. Time and the market for short cuts is the big bargaining chip of retailers at the moment. We are tempted by one-hour delivery although this is not actually what it sounds like as it usually refers to ‘one hour slots’ not delivery an hour after you order – unless perhaps you live in the very centre of London. However, same day delivery, door to door from all supermarkets and also new entrants to the market mean that we can save time by not even leaving the house. Yet it goes deeper than that. What about the time it takes to produce the food in the first place? This is where the apples come in.

As someone researching work in food production, I’m slightly ashamed to say that one of the few things in my diet that I actually pick myself are apples. I should of course have an allotment, or a veg patch. My excuses for not having one are many: the uncertainty of how long I will live in my house (veg patch excuse), this city (allotment excuse), the lack of skill and experience (even my raspberry plant died) … I could go on. But really, the reason is time. It’s very difficult (not impossible) to be an active player in a competitive work environment, in a tough economic context and grow your own veg. And that’s why I understand people buying ready meals. And I also understand why calls for a four day working week [3] might do more as much improve our diets as a ‘fat tax’ because it would give us more time to grow and cook food.

The thing is the apples aren’t even mine. Not only because my house is rented, but also because the trunk is in the neighbour’s garden. Once my housemates and I have collected them from windfall, or stood on the ladder, or climbed up the tree though, they are quite literally: the fruits of our labour. Delicious, tart and juicy for eating and cooking, for making crumble and pie, for stewing and freezing, for chopping and grating and even… for mixing with chocolate and turning into a squidgy sweet, added-sugar-free chocolate brownie! [4]

For most people who pick fruit and vegetables in the intensive horticultural system, the fruits of their labour are not what they pick or the value of that, but a wage that is so low it keeps the producers in profit (just) and maintains a price that satisfies consumers with very modestly valued apples. I deduce that this means for my neighbours, it is cheaper (time-wise) and easier to buy apples from the shops than to pick the ones in the back garden. And it’s only because they don’t care about the tree that we get a free harvest. We just have to hope they don’t decide to chop it down.

[1] Jenny Linford, 2018, The Missing Ingredient: The Curious Role of Time in Food and Flavour, Penguin. https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/291/291455/the-missing-ingredient/9781846148972.html

[2] According to market research by Kantar. The full study is behind a paywall, this is an excerpt. https://pork.ahdb.org.uk/media/74830/convenience-is-key.pdf

[3] Now an active part of public debate and calls. See, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/sep/11/four-day-working-week-tuc-proposals-workers-rights and, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-45750920

[4] For the brownie recipe try something like this: https://www.feastingonfruit.com/easy-vegan-fudge-brownies/ I usually search vegan chocolate apple brownie and make something based on the different advice given and the ingredients I have to hand.

Food Connections

Last week the Bristol Food Connections festival explored “all that is GREAT about food in Bristol (and beyond)” [1]. This made me realise that what I am exploring are the separations in our global food system. While so much of food in Bristol is ‘GREAT’ there is still much work to do about what is NOT SO GREAT. In the global food system, the separations between those who produce and those who consume what is transported around the world are many: income, origin, lifestyle, language, history, opportunities, culture, diet, microbiome – you name it there are separations in the way we eat and live.

This weekend I co-facilitated an event, Philosophy Breakfast: The ethics of global food production, with Julian Baggini, philosopher and author of the book, Virtues of the table: How to eat and think, [2]. Julian focused our thoughts on ethics and justice, and I grounded us with a case study, on tomatoes produced in Morocco, based on my recent fieldwork. We were treated, literally, to food for thought, in the form of a breakfast bap and coffee from the Boston Tea Party as well as a full house of attendees ready and willing to reflect on their role in the food systems. I was determined that this group, who had been motivated enough to get up for a 10am Sunday start, also be given space to tell us what we should be considering in relation to the ethics of food. So, we invited each table to choose a breakfast food element to reflect upon, bread, coffee, tea, bacon, tomatoes and mushrooms, as they slowly digested its nutrients and food dilemmas.

Framing the session Julian considered our role as consumers by drawing on the thoughts of some classical philosophers from Plato to Sen: we should not, he suggested, be afraid of always getting everything right, but we should at least do our best to avoid contributing to what we find clearly morally wrong. How to go about this? I asked our participants to think of questions which might help us reflect on each of the breakfast items to help us consider these dilemmas. Furthermore, perhaps we might have questions for others; for the supermarkets, for the governments, and for the companies involved. My favourite question from this savvy group was, for meat: “was it worth an animal dying for me to eat this?” something that connects to my blog on the great value of seeing meat as sacrifice: ‘L hawli‘.

Df5PSK-X0AA6JFs.jpg large

My talk related more to the question about coffee, “What labour standards (how bad would they be) would stop you buying coffee?”. What a question. International labour standards usually boil down to a mutual agreement that the countries involved in trade will apply their national labour laws. They may also be required to ensure that these national laws meet international standards, but what are these international standards? Since the 1998 ILO Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work (ILO, 1998) [3], international labour law has been focused, or in practice narrowed, depending on your perspective, to just eight core conventions covering four areas (collective bargaining, forced labour, child labour, non-discrimination at work), out of a possible 189 conventions covering many other very important areas [4]. So this is a relatively weak starting point, which in most cases simply attempts to ensure already existing minimum standards (laws) are implemented.

What happens also, when national laws do not meet the needs of workers? Too often agricultural work is excluded from normal labour standards, or minimum wages are lower in this sector. This is not just the case in poorer countries. In the USA, the world’s richest state, many agricultural workers are exempted from minimum wage and overtime entitlements of the main national labour legislation, the Fair Labour Standards Act [5]. This is discrimination sanctioned by law.

Such discrimination between agriculture and other sectors is also the case in Morocco, where I carried out fieldwork. Whilst the legal minimum wage in other sectors is £8.29, the minimum day wage for agricultural workers is significantly lower at £5.37. OK, you may think, but life is cheaper there. Not that much cheaper. We can convert that minimum agricultural wage to a UK equivalent via the Purchasing Power Parity formula, (or PPP) this tells you what the equivalent wage would be in the UK. That equivalent of that minimum agricultural wage in a UK context with UK housing, food and other costs would be £13.51. This is not enough to live comfortably, barely enough to survive.

This is why then, the first findings chapter of my thesis is entitled “No Money”. If a major supply chain, feeding us year round with produce that we increasingly depend upon, rests on a starting point of an unreasonably low minimum wage, we cannot consider this a socially sustainable global food connection. And it is a connection. Although we are separated by distance, language, culture and long food chains, it was not difficult to find tomatoes just on our doorstep. Even last week when the ‘counter-season’ was officially over (as we now produce more in the UK so there is less market for non-EU producers) I could easily identify tomatoes in Bristol from a major company in business just outside of Agadir, Morocco (where my research is focused). I know workers from this company’s greenhouses and packhouses and spent months in daily conversations with them about what needs to change. They are calling for increases in wages and working conditions, better childcare and better social infrastructure. The separations then, are there to be bridged.

Transparency came up a lot on the morning of our event. How is there so much information about the attributes of food itself, and so little about those that produce it? We can only find out about food if actors involved in the sector are willing to be open (governments, retailers, employers). This showed at the Bristol Fruit Market, which I also visited as part of the Food Connections festival. The openness of the owners to discuss their business and show us around their distribution centre was in very clear contrast to the supermarket distribution centres which are shrouded in secrecy. Yet this is not the case at every stage of the process and it is only by asking questions, and showing that we care, that we can have any leverage at all to shift the harshest dynamics of global food systems.

Why are wages so low in the food sector? How can we revalue food? How can we keep alternative routes to market going (such as through wholesale)? How do we know if workers are treated fairly? What does that mean? How can we improve social and labour conditions in global production? These some of the questions that I am working on at the moment.

Groups feed back from their discussions at the Philosophy Breakfast event 17th June 2018

[1] Bristol Food Connections Festival website, https://www.bristolfoodconnections.com/about-us/

[2] BAGGINI, J. 2014. The virtues of the table: How to eat and think, Granta Books.

[3] ILO 1998. ILO Declaration on fundamental principles and rights at work. International Labour Conference. Geneva: International Labour Office.

[4] For a list of the 189 ILO conventions, see, http://www.ilo.org/dyn/normlex/en/f?p=1000:12000:7956775033045::::P12000_INSTRUMENT_SORT:4

[5] See, Guide to the Fair Labor Standards Act, https://www.dol.gov/whd/regs/compliance/hrg.htm#10

[6] This is known locally as the difference of the SMIG, the minimum legal industrial wage, and the SMAG, the minimum legal agricultural wage. The SMIG is set by the hour (13.46 Moroccan Dirhams). An 8-hour equivalent of the SMIG comes to the GBP of £8.29. This can then be compared to the minimum agricultural wage, set by the day at 69.73 Moroccan Dirhams, equivalent to £5.37 per day.