Between 60,000 and 80,000 migrant workers come to Britain every year to work in agriculture and horticulture OLI SCARFF/AFP/Getty ImagesBritish food producers will need to consider investing much more heavily in robots, automated harvesting and processing equipment to cope with the loss of migrant labour by leaving the EU, according to KPMG. Karen Briggs, head of Brexit at the professional services company, said that companies would need to look at new technologies to solve the problems of potential shortages in cheap foreign labour especially from Eastern Europe. “What Brexit has done is really highlight some of the issues around low productivity that we have in the UK, the low level of take-up of artificial intelligence and automation,” she said. The UK has one of the lowest levels of robots per capita of any developed nation with only 71 per 10,000 manufacturing employees. That compares…

Source: The Times September 17, 2017 23:03 UTC