The buying and selling of organs is a huge business for Europe's poorest country, Moldova. According to organ trafficking specialists, Moldova is one of the key suppliers to the world organ trade and Moldovan kidneys are the cheapest priced in Europe. The country is one of the top 3 suppliers in the thriving global black market in organ sales, according to a just-released report on organ trafficking.
According to the report, a record rise in human organ-farming has made Moldova one of the leading source countries although with just over 3 million inhabitants it is much smaller in size than the world's two other organ trafficking centers, Brazil (184 million people) and India (1.12 billion people). The prominent position of Moldova in the illegal organ trade is because "this place is a black hole, no one cares about the population and government officials can just do what they want," in the words of a lawyer who recently left Moldova and today lives near Copenhagen, Denmark.

Along with Brazil and India, Reuters has named Moldova is one of the top 3 source countries in the world for organs.

Worldwide, the buying and selling of organs is a huge business, and the export of human raw material is bringing hard currency to Moldova. Officially listed as Europe's poorest country, Moldova is now the West's center for the illegal organ trade. The country shares a common border with the European Union, but is officially outside EU jurisdiction and not subject to international scrutiny.

Under foreign pressure, Moldova recently banned the organ trade but that hasn’t kept an entrenched class of brokers from continuing their operations on the black market. Government officials are deeply involved in the organ trade, and visitors to the outlying villages south of Chisinau can still see women with large, curving scars. Even now that the trade is supposed to banned, the law