Thai berry-pickers return home after earning year's salary in Lapland.

This year's berry-picking season turned out to be better than expected. The Thai berry-pickers in Savukoski earned from EUR 3,000 to EUR 7,000 by picking and selling wild berries.
Even though the pickers have to pay EUR 1,000 each for a flight ticket, they will have a nice amount of money left to take back home. In his or her home country a Thai earns about EUR 2,000 a year.

     
On Tuesday the pickers were in high spirits, while waiting for their bus to start in the evening. Moreover, a flight home was scheduled for Wednesday. A couple of months' hard work was over.
"I am very pleased", said Sem Kammani, a 35-year-old furniture salesman from Thailand, giving a broad smile. He became the master of lingonberry picking in Savukoski with his harvest of 1,200 kilos, while his blueberry yield of 4,000 kilos was the second largest.

     
"Everybody is glad and happy, wishing to come here even next year", reports Bandit Jansamram, the 41-year-old interpreter of the Thai pickers.
The majority of the 650 Thais invited by Riitan Herkku - a food processing company in Mustasaari - are flying home today, while the others will head for Thailand on Sunday.
"The season has been better than we dared to expect. Our target was to get a total of over a million kilos of wild berries, and we managed to get a lot more. The amount of blueberries alone was 2.5 times more than last year", reports Jari Huttunen from Korvatunturin Marja, a company affiliated with Riitan Herkku.

Even though the berry crop was said to be poor this season?
     
"It all depends on how hard you want to find berries. Our pickers were lucky to be placed in Eastern Lapland, where the the yields were better", Huttunen notes.
Korvatunturin Marja had also recruited some Ukrainian and Mongolian berry-pickers. Huttunen hopes that the problems which some companies had with berry-pickers would not cause trouble next year for those entrepreneurs who had acted properly.
"It is hopeless to invite hundreds of berry-pickers while not putting any cars at their disposal. Buses are not practical for berry-picking purposes. We had more than a hundred cars available for pickers", Huttunen concludes.

     
In the first summer, some of the local residents criticised the berry-pickers who came to Savukoski from overseas. However, the attitudes seem to have relaxed, and this summer the atmosphere was fairly calm.

Thanoom Muunoongsang, a 35-year-old car mechanic, was pleased with his record of 202 kilos of blueberries in one day.
On the other hand, the berry-picking business creates employment also for local people. Close to 30 people were hired to work at the freezing plant of Korvatunturin Marja and to participate in the company's expansion project this summer. Furthermore, other businesses of Korvatunturin Marja in Savukoski include a garage and a vehicle inspection station.
While packing their suitcases and playing checkers, the Thais are all smiles. Most of them are rice farmers at home. "See you next summer", many of them say happily.
Whilst the foreign pickers are very efficient, there is no danger that Finland will be "picked clean": the vast majority of wild berries and mushrooms available in the Finnish forests rot where they grow.

As reported in Helsinki Sanomat.