‘My family need my support to eat’: how Indonesians came to work on a Kent farm

Drawn to the prospect of a job abroad, people such as Banyu signed up to a language course. From there, their debts to brokers grew

Sitting in a caravan in the hot Kent countryside, Banyu's face is etched with worry. It is July and he is less than a month into a job picking fruit at Clock House farm near Maidstone, which supplies strawberries, raspberries and other soft fruit to leading supermarket chains.

He says he arrived from Indonesia this summer 5,000 in debt to an unlicensed broker in Bali, handing over the deeds to his family home as surety. He only has a six-month visa for the picking season and is scared that the work is not as lucrative as he hoped.