A coffee picker at work (Photo: dantri.com.vn) Dak Nong (VNS/VNA) - A few years ago hundreds of people used to descend on coffee plantations in the Central Highlands region to work as coffee pickers during the harvest season when coffee prices were high.
However, now prices have fallen, there is less interest in the work.
According to many plantation owners in Dak Nong province, coffee picking used to provide a stable income for thousands of labourers.
Over the past three-four years, more and more coffee plantations had been converted to other crops, leaving the work less attractive, Dan Tri online newspaper reported.
Now many coffee farmers struggle to find workers for the harvest.
Nguyen Van Dung, the owner of a coffee plantation in in Dak Dro commune, Krong No district, said his family began harvesting coffee in mid-November this year.
This year, labour costs were higher than last year, but it was still difficult to find workers due to the low coffee yield, according to Dung.
Every day, he and his wife have to work on the plantation from early in the morning to the late afternoon because they have only been able to hire two pickers.
In previous years during the harvest, coffee pickers got paid a daily wage, but now they want paying for how much coffee they pick, with prices from 1,000-1,200 VND per kg of ripe fruit.
The workers often chose plantations where the fruit was ripe to save time, the newspaper reported.
Hien, a coffee grower living in the same commune as Dung, said coffee pickers could earn 400,000 VND (17.2 USD) per day.
"We now have to find workers. For this crop, I've hired 10 people. I have to prepare accommodation and meals for them," Hien said.
"They will leave if something makes them unhappy during the harvest."
"Every year, the coffee farmers have search for pickers when the harvest comes. If the coffee isn’t picked immediately, the trees can crack and fall to the ground. Quality will suffer and the coffee will be ruined."
Y Dem, a rice farmer living in Dak Lak province, said he had worked as a coffee picker for seven years.
During the coffee harvest, his family of seven travel to Dak Nong province to work on the coffee plantationsgardens.
It takes four days to a week to pick coffee from a plantation and his family can make tens of millions of VND.
“Last week, we just finished picking 1ha of coffee, earning 12 million VND. Our daily meals are prepared by the plantation owners," Y Dem said.
"We can get if a bigger bonus if we stop the branches from breaking."
Plantation owners also compete with each other by paying higher wages for workers and taking better care for them during harvest time.
In recent years, manual workers in some delta provinces have moved to industrial zones because it is not as hard as picking coffee.
Meanwhile, a number of young labourers from the Central Highlands had moved to big cities to find jobs, leading to a shortage of coffee pickers, the newspaper reported./.
VNA
