Commercial Wild Berry Picking as a Source of Income in Northern and Eastern Finland Available to Purchase

In recent times the potential of non-wood forest products (NWFP) in forestbased rural development has been paid an increasing amount of attention. In the case of developing countries, the economic importance of NWFPs in the subsistence of their rural economies has always been recognised as important, but little is known at the moment about the income generation role of NWFPs in the industrial countries in the boreal zone. The aim of the present study has been to examine the importance of commercial wild berry picking in household economies in four rural municipalities and one modest-sized city, all of them situated in the eastern and northern parts of Finland. It has been found that berry picking has provided additional income for between 8% and 31% of households on a scale ranging between FIM 1000 and 3280 FIM (USD 167547) for the households involved. In general it can be said that berry picking proves to be of minor importance for individual household economies, since for the majority of cases picking provides no more than 3% of annual gross income, although in a few cases professional pickers were able to earn more than 10% of their annual income in this way. For this study the factors affecting commercial picking have been examined using both the Tobit model and also models concerned with the separately estimated propensity to participate in the activity (logit) and with the intensity of the picking activity (OLS). Our econometric analysis indicates that picking intensity is highest among underemployed households, a factor which emphasises the socio-economic function of the utilisation of NWFPs even in the boreal zone.