Agriculture and the effects of drought

The prolonged drought in the past few weeks has dramatically impacted Romania. The Government is now looking for ways to partially compensate the farmers losses.

Corina Cristea, 20.08.2015, 13:26

After more than two months of drought and four months without precipitations it’s finally raining in Romania. Meteorologists say it should rain uninterruptedly for two weeks, for the underground water reserves to reach normal levels again. The prolonged drought of July and August has created big problems for Romanian farmers, who say their crops are compromised on hundreds of thousands of hectares, in most regions of the country, the total volume of losses exceeding 2 billion Euros. In this context, the Romanian government is ready to pay compensations to the farmers whose crops have been severely affected by drought. Prime Minister Victor Ponta, has asked Agriculture Minister Daniel Cosntantin to assess the damages.

Corn, sunflower and soy crops have been severely damaged, just as the wheat and maize crops and also fruit and vegetables. Representatives of the Romanian Farmers’ Associations are expecting crops to be by 25-30% smaller than in 2014 and say that, against the current background, farmers will not be able to prepare the new agricultural year. Another big problem of Romanian agriculture is the poor state of the irrigation system, which now covers only 300,000 hectares as compared to 3.3 million hectares in 1989.

Upgrading the country’s irrigation system would cost about 1 billion euros. The Agriculture Minister has recently advanced the idea that such project could be finance with European funds, if included in the so-called “Junker plan”, a public investment project under which over 300 billion euros are made available for the EU countries’ economies. According to Daniel Constantin, a draft law on the irrigation system’s upgrading might be brought to Parliament.