President Igor Dodon considers regulations to enable farmers to have access to groundwater, as everyone has access to this, should be worked out as swiftly as possible, even if the ecologists and about 80 NGO sound the alarm about the danger implied by this process – soil degradation and exhaustion of drinking water, IPN reports.
In the program “President Responds”, President Dodon said the lack of irrigation will be the key problem in agriculture. The given problem appeared in the Soviet period, when billions of rubles were invested in the irrigation systems of Moldova. “If we don’t irrigate, Moldova’s agriculture doesn’t have a future,” he stated.
According to Igor Dodon, the problem can be solved temporarily or systemically. However, to solve the problem systemically, tens of billions of lei needs to be invested. Until this money is found, it was decided to allow farmers to irrigate the farmland with water from rivers and lakes, even if these are private.
The temporary solution at this stage is to ensure access to groundwater, in the way in which this is done in Romania and Ukraine. President Dodon considers not everyone will use this water as it is expensive to build an artesian well and water there is not always of a higher quality and expensive filters need to be set up. Only the owners of fields with high value crops, such as fruit and vegetables, will afford to use his type of irrigation.
About 80 NGOs issued a statement, expressing their concern about President Igor Dodon’s initiative to allow irrigating vineyards and orchards with groundwater. The activists consider this will affect the quality of irrigated soil and will lead to a drastic decline in the volume of groundwater. They propose rehabilitating the sources of surface water for the purpose.
