BLOODBERRIES: Hidden Slavery in the World’s Happiest Nations (PDF)

They said it could not be proven. The courts disagreed.

Finland's Supreme Court: 26 counts of human trafficking. Sweden's Court of Appeal for Upper Norrland: aggravated human exploitation, established. Lapland District Court, September 2025: 62 counts of aggravated human trafficking.

These are not allegations. They are verdicts — written into the law of the two countries routinely ranked the happiest on earth.

Since 2005, Thai workers have harvested 80 to 90 per cent of a wild-berry crop worth €500 million a year, gathered from forests that, by law, belong to everyone. Since 2022, human-trafficking complaints involving 800 people have been filed with Finnish and Swedish police, implicating more than forty companies across Thailand, Finland, and Sweden.

Bloodberries is the result of sixteen years of open campaigning and standing side by side with Thai berry pickers in their struggle for justice and reparation. It names the recruitment networks, the corporate structures, and the state systems that together constitute one of the largest labour-trafficking operations in the Nordic world.

This is not a story about bad actors at the margins. It is a story about how legal systems, government agencies, and listed corporations work together — through policy, through silence, through profit — to make exploitation possible.

The campaign brought cases to court in both Finland and Sweden. The verdicts confirmed what the workers had always known.

Fifty per cent of all profits go directly to the Migrant Workers Union of Thailand (MWUT).

Buying this book is not a donation. It is evidence that the story has reached you.

Junya Yimprasert