A seasonal foreign workers program is crucial to a thriving provincial horticultural industry. That’s the blunt conclusion in a recently-released study by Guelph-based Agri-food Economic Systems on the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program.
It says that program, which uses seasonal workers from Mexico and the Caribbean, supports an annual $5.4 billion in economic activity and 34,280 full-time jobs in Ontario.
Ken Forth, president of the program administrator Foreign Agricultural Resource Management Services, said the study reaffirms what a similar research project highlighted 15 years ago. “Those jobs created are happening within agriculture and on the edge of agriculture,” he said. “And it’s as a result of these seasonal workers being here.”
The SAWP was established in 1966 in response to a serious shortage of available domestic agricultural workers.