One of the reasons why human trafficking is always a step ahead of the authorities is its capacity to keep pace with the latest trends in a country’s economy.

This is one of the conclusions that could be drawn from an April 7 conference on the fight against human trafficking held in Sofia and hosted by the RiskMonitor foundation and the National Investigative Service.

According to a RiskMonitor report, the latest trend in money laundering was to invest in Bulgaria’s agriculture. Until recently, human traffickers used the tourism sector and the opening of luxury boutiques to wash their cash, but since Bulgaria joined the European Union and got access to EU funds, the pattern has changed.

Another reason why agriculture was so attractive to human traffickers was that the transfer of money was difficult to follow.  Further, those involved in agriculture are eligible for a variety of tax relief.

Another method was for human traffickers to report to tax authorities agricultural production at a level higher than the actual figures. The difference is covered by "dirty money".  
Buying from small producers and selling the goods at a price sometimes double was another method of money laundering, the report said.

Bulgarian human traffickers were making about a billion euro a year with between 50 and 80 per cent of the money going back to Bulgaria, according to the report.

Usually this happened through loans to people recruited for the purpose while outside the country. When these people came back to Bulgaria, they "returned" the loans to human traffickers.

Risk Monitor said that annually, about 10 000 Bulgarian women were victims of human trafficking.

As with money laundering, here too there were new trends. Until now the main destination for Bulgarian prostitutes was Western Europe (70 per cent of all prostitutes in
Belgium were Bulgarians). More recently, the US and South Africa appeared on the map of Bulgarian human traffickers, the report said.

Prostitution was not the only area of business for Bulgarian human traffickers. A serious problem was the trafficking of children who are used for begging on the streets in Western countries. These children were predominantly of Roma origin and aged between eight and 14 years.

According to Bulgarian National Anti-Trafficking Commission chief secretary Antoaneta Vassileva, the trafficking of babies was also a pressing problem. She gave Greece as an example where Bulgarian children made up the largest number of all child victims of human trafficking.

"Because of demographic problems, there is high demand for children in Greece," she told the forum.

According to her, the price for a baby boy was 18 000 euro and for a baby girl between 13 000 and 14 000 euro. Usually the money was paid in two transactions, she said, but in most cases the mother - usually of Roma origin - got no more than 3000 euro. If the buyers did not like the baby very much, the price could go down, she said.

Vassileva said that hospitals were well aware of the trafficking scheme. Usually a baby that was to be trafficked was not registered when born or it was registered as a child with a Greek father who claimed it as his own and left the country immediately with signed permission from the mother. Lawyers and notaries were also involved in the scheme.

A major problem was that no one in Bulgaria kept a record of pregnant women who left the country, meaning that there was no means of recording when a woman left the country pregnant but returned without a child.

According to Alexander Karagiannis, deputy chief of mission of the US embassy in Sofia, sending human traffickers to jail was not a good enough measure against human trafficking. What had to be done was to cut off their financial resources, which despite its progress Bulgaria was still not doing sufficiently.