There are growing fears some of this year's Northern Territory mango harvest may never make it to the nation's supermarkets, as the local economy strains under widespread worker shortages.
The NT government is now looking overseas for help picking fruit across the Top End of the territory, which is the nation's largest mango producer.
But with the annual fruit-picking season already in its early stages, industry groups have warned the sector is still short of about 1,000 workers.
"We've got jobs currently advertised for 317 positions, for which we got 13 applicants last week," Paul Burke from NT Farmers said.
"It's everything from pickers, packers, forklift drivers; we're really critically short of truck drivers at the moment.
"It'll mean longer hours and it means some fruit may not get picked — and that's a travesty."
Mr Burke said an estimated 10 to 20 per cent of last year's yield went unpicked.
The government says this year's harvest is likely to be even bigger, outdoing last year's trade by 300,000 to produce an anticipated 2.7 million trays in the Darwin region alone.
Industry groups say the strong season is a double-edged sword, as producers compete with other industries for workers and the high price of fuel drives up costs.
Canberra could be key to Top End harvest
The territory government says it has appealed to the federal government to speed up visa processing in order to get more hands on farms.
"The federal government has already committed more resources into that," Mr Burke said.
"We need them to start today so we can continue to process visas in a speedy way."
A trade delegation will depart for East Timor tomorrow to investigate how to encourage a stronger flow of workers across the Timor Sea.
Relaxing some visa requirements for workers from the half-island nation, just 700 kilometres from Darwin, was a key proposal to come out of last week's federal jobs and skills summit.
The Northern Territory government has said the federal government was receptive to the idea.
"We've been pushing the federal government for quite some time to look at separate arrangements for the Northern Territory," Business, Jobs and Training minister Paul Kirby said today.
"We do have more people living just to the north of us than to the south of us.
"So the capacity for us to invest in bespoke visa arrangements with countries to the north is absolutely what we'll be talking about with Timorese people and certainly be ramming home with the federal government as well."
The NT government has also said the Territory would push for a greater share of the lifted permanent migration cap given difficulties attracting workers to the nation's remote north.
Mango harvesting injects more than $100 million into the Northern Territory's economy each year and usually employs thousands of workers.
No quick fix to worker shortage
Fifty-five thousand trays were sent to market last week, with Darwin's harvest expected to peak in mid-October.
While the hope that more workers could help fill the 1000-worker shortage, a major Northern Territory grower has warned it won't have capacity to house overseas workers.
Red Rich Fruits director Matt Palise said the company's four farms in the Top End are missing between 15 and 20 per cent of their workforce and will struggle to pick all of this season's harvest.
But he said the bigger issue would be finding a place to accommodate them.
"Even when you get access to those workers, there's not enough infrastructure in the Northern Territory and in Darwin in particular to house them," he said.
"A lot of the workforce used to be transitional backpackers, so they would be staying in Darwin in hostels."
Mr Palise said it was too late in the season to begin building infrastructure on farms to house overseas workers, saying the question was now whether housing could be built before next year's harvest.
