No Thai will pick berries in Finland

Not a single Thai worker has applied to come to Finland for the upcoming picking season, following changes in visa procedures. The new rules mean that Thai workers must have both a Schengen visa and a so-called exit visa that enables them to leave Thailand, according to Helsinki Times.

“We have to re-examine our procedures,” Katja Luopajärvi, the deputy head of the visa unit at the Ministry for Foreign Affairs, said to YLE.

“The latest information indicates that not a single visa has been granted yet. This is absolutely incomprehensible. At one point, it was looking like things would start rolling, but in reality there’s hardly any movement,” Birgitta Partanen, the executive director of Arctic Flavours, told YLE.

“It coud mean that quite a few companies will go bankrupt. I’m hoping until the last minute that won’t happen,” she said.

Last summer, there were police investigations and criminal prosecutions for human trafficking and this is the first picking season since that.