The Parliament’s legal commission approved a bill stipulating penalties for landowners who do not clean their plots. The pensioners without heirs and the unable to work persons will not be fined. The bill was put forward by the Ministry of Agriculture, IPN reports.
In the commission’s meeting, Minister of Agriculture Vasile Bumacov said the bill creates the legal framework needed to fine the persons who, profiting from unfavorable periods, bought hundreds of hectares of land from the population at small prices and now do not cultivate it. They are waiting for the price to grow so as to sell it. The uncultivated land favors the development of diseases, parasites and weeds that affect the cultivated plots from nearby.
The bill was submitted over a year and a half ago. It was rejected for several times as the MPs didn’t consider it right to oblige the people to cultivate their land. In the end, it was decided to replace the word ‘cultivate’ by ‘sanitize’, which implies cutting the weeds.
The lawmakers underlined that having rights means having obligations too. An owner with hundreds of cultivated hectares should not suffer because another owner with 10 areas in close proximity leaves the land lie fallow. The commission’s head Raisa Apolschii said the bill should be extended to cover the plots allotted for building houses on, not only the farmland.
