The first French agricultural union FNSEA, the French immigration office and the Moroccan employment agency signed an agreement to “facilitate the hiring of Moroccan seasonal agricultural workers” by French farmers, the FNSEA announced on Friday.
The agreement was signed with the French Office for Immigration and Integration (Ofii) and the Moroccan public institution responsible for employment, Anapec.
circular immigration
The FNSEA thus says that it wants to lay “the foundations of a virtuous and responsible approach whose challenge is clear: to offer farmers a secure collective contracting ‘process’, guaranteeing employees an introduction, integration and return to their countries in a organized and respectful framework”.
If the framework agreement, consulted by AFP and dated June 27, does not commit to any quantified objective, it is part of an “explosion” in the use of Moroccan seasonal workers in recent years, Didier Leschi stressed: 15,700 seasonal workers from Morocco arrived to work in France in 2022, more than 10,000 in 2021, 6,300 in 2018.
air bridges
“We bring them permanently,” sums up the head of the Ofii, which also organizes the arrival of workers from Tunisia and Turkey, but in a “more limited” way.
Foreign seasonal workers, who have returned in large numbers since the lifting of COVID-19 restrictions, are a vital cog in the wheel of French agriculture.
In agricultural companies, this workforce has become so essential over the years that employers have asked the French authorities to organize exceptional airlifts at the height of the pandemic, to transport weapons while air links were down. paralyzed.
The Ofii had thus brought 900 Moroccan workers in October 2020 to “save the crops” of clementines from Corsica. Or 300 more in December of the same year to Bouches-du-Rhône and Vaucluse to work in horticulture and horticulture.
Source: BFM TV
