It's unclear how many foreign strawberry pickers will work in Finland this summer, Heidi Wirtanen of the Finnish Association of Fruit and Berry Growers, told the Finnish news agency (STT) on Sunday.
"More or less the same people used to come for seasonal work, but now there is a fairly high turnover," she said, adding that the demand for pickers is the same as in previous years.
Typically some 70 percent of berry pickers in Finland have come from Ukraine. This year, some of the Ukrainian pickers in Finland are refugees who have gained the right to work through temporary protection. However, many Ukrainians in Finland have obtained year-round employment and are not available for berry picking this summer, according to Wirtanen.
Last year, war-prompted picker shortages left millions of kilos of strawberries unpicked.
Despite the cool weather so far, the strawberry harvest is ripening on schedule, which is to say around Midsummer, according to Sari Peltonen, a development manager at ProAgria, a rural consultancy.
The warm weather forecast for next week is also expected to accelerate the ripening process.
The price of strawberries may rise slightly compared to last year, as factors such as frost protection and increased production costs could be passed on to the consumer. According to Peltonen, consumers looking for savings may meanwhile opt for foreign strawberries over domestic ones at the store this summer.
