Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development Adrian Oros said on Monday evening that over one million hectares of corn and sunflower have been affected by the extreme and strong pedological drought this year, but solutions are being sought to compensate the farmers who sowed in the spring, according to Agerpres.
"If we refer to this year's harvest, it was very, very drastically affected by the extreme and severe pedological drought, which affected the production of grains sown last autumn, but also what was sown in the spring. Of the 2.9 million hectares sown in autumn, 1.18 million hectares were affected (...). We have said that we are making compensations and it is normal to make these compensations, and for the spring harvest the compensations have reached the farmers' accounts. The Government has allocated 850 million lei, of course not enough. We could not cover all the losses that the farmers had (...) For the areas sown in the spring we have an assessment, we are doing the checks and we are looking for solutions to compensate these farmers as well", Oros told B1 TV.
The minister said that in the long run this is not the solution, because "the compensations do not cover the losses suffered by any means".
"We need to stop being a weather-dependent agriculture and we need to invest very, very quickly in this water management strategy and we have found this opportunity in the national program to relaunch and increase resilience, where we have allocated 6.5 billion euros, money that will have to be spent between 2021 and 2026," he added.
Asked if there would be price increases in food and especially bread due to the drought, the agriculture minister replied: "This will certainly not happen."