Drought, Frost Damaged Over One Seventh Of Romanian Crops

"The data centralized by the minister up until this morning, we have 1-1.054 million hectares damaged, some of the with damage of over 50%, while others with less damage. We will contact the National Institute for Meteorology. They are the ones who can issue the literature, so that we can declare state of calamity. In any case, we will have calamities, because it seems June will be the month with the most drought," Sarbu said.

He added farmers whose land is damaged could, receive compensation from the Government’s special intervention fund.

"We compensate losses through irrigating a surface of 500,000 hectares, the surface we could rehabilitate so far, compared to the 600,000 that were rehabilitated in winter," Sarbu said.

In addition, the dignitary said the ministry is planning a program for the rehabilitation of 1.5 million hectares of crops over a four-year interval.

"We are trying to do as much as possible, but anyway the 1.5 million hectares will not be enough. We need to plant forests, but farmers too need to begin digging wells, because this would be much cheaper and handier," Sarbu said.

According to the minister, before 1990 Romania had three million irrigated hectares, and the current irrigation system is obsolete, with Russian pumps from the ’60s and ‘70s, with high capacities and high energy consumption.

In addition, another objective of the Ministry of Agriculture in the upcoming years is the completion of the Siret-Baragan CAnal, which only has 11 km rehabilitated so far, since "this canal would solve problems for one million hectares,” according to Sarbu.