Foreign berry-pickers put on spot by empty promises and poor crop in Lapland

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As a result of the unusually dry summer, the prospects for the berry crop in Finnish Lapland appear to remain poor this season. Hence many Russian and Ukrainian berry-pickers, who have travelled to Finland with high hopes of earning money by picking wild berries, find themselves between a rock and a hard place.
      They feel cheated and would like to go home, but have no money for a return trip. Nor do they have any money for food.
     
In Pello, on the western border of Finnish Lapland, local people feel sorry for the foreign pickers. For example, entrepreneur Päivi Heikkala took some left-over food from her restaurant to the Russian and Ukrainian young men who have their lodgings in the village.
      In Rovaniemi, situated on the Arctic Circle, the Ukrainians - some one hundred university students - contacted the local police on Thursday in order to arrange their journey back home.
     
Their journey to the nearby village of Tiainen was arranged by a Russian travel agency in cooperation with a company in Espoo, which went bankrupt last week.
      According to the police, the young pickers had been promised accommodation in log cabins plus EUR 50 a day for berry-picking. Instead, they were put up in a vacant school in Tiainen, not far from Rovaniemi.
      A travel agency in Sodankylä, northeast of Rovaniemi, has reported that discussions with the authorities about the return trip of the Ukrainians are under way.
     
Entrepreneur Armas Kristo, who invited the Russian berry-pickers to Pello and paid for their visas, has promised to buy also the berries picked by the Ukrainians in the Tiainen village.
      Kristo has been inviting dozens of berry-pickers from Russia to Finland for several years, and in a normal summer, they earn well. For accommodation he charges three euros per day.
     
However, this summer the pickers' yields have been low, as particularly blueberries seem to have been scorched and dried in the forest. "The blueberries look like peppercorns", Armas Kristo comments.
      The foreign berry-pickers were not prepared for the prospect of having lower earnings than expected. Some of the Russian pickers do not have enough money to pay even for their lodgings, and they have to spend the nights in their car.


Previously in HS International Edition:
  Thai berry-pickers are welcome in Finnish Lapland (1.8.2006)

Links:
  Rovaniemi - the capital of Lapland

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