The coronavirus has frozen migrant labor, leaving farmers and workers desperate.
It wasn’t yet 9 a.m., but Promdeth Phonsrikaew stood sweat-soaked in the field.
On this day, their lives would intersect amid the crosscurrents of supply and demand in South Korea’s agricultural industry: an aging, hyper-urbanized society in voracious need of farmhands, and migrant workers arriving from elsewhere in Asia to take on arduous work no longer wanted by locals. With half of the population concentrated in the capital of Seoul and the surrounding metropolitan area, most South Koreans live without encountering the reality that the nation’s workforce is increasingly made up of migrant workers. That’s especially true in agricultural areas, where farmers say the vast majority of work is done by migrants, legal and otherwise.
In South Korea this year, farms had requested more than 5,000 seasonal migrant workers through a government program. To date, not one has been able to enter the country due to coronavirus-related restrictions. Workers who left haven’t been able to return amid closed borders, canceled flights and heightened immigration scrutiny. That shortage has been an unanticipated boon for the likes of Phonsrikaew, who have seen their day rates grow by about 20% to 30% compared with last year.A Thai migrant takes a pause in the middle of a nearly 12-hour day picking tobacco leaves on a farm in South Korea, where farms are experiencing a shortage of workers because of coronavirus-related travel restrictions.
Park Jong-bum sorts tobacco leaves before hanging them up for drying at his farm, where he planted tobacco for the first time this year. For workers to harvest leaves from his four acres of tobacco, Park turned to a tree farmer who connects day laborers with employers on the side. The workers, none of whom he knew, were dropped off shortly after daybreak at his orange-roofed cattle shed.Park Jong-bum, left, and Natawat Tongratoke unload bales of tobacco leaves collected from the fields.
The workers were supposed to arrive by the end of July; their fate still remains in limbo, because of the unavailability of return flights for the workers after their 90-day stay, according to the Ministry of Justice.
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