By refraining from the mass protests planned initially for May 27, the agrarians give Prime Minister Chiril Gaburici’s Government the last chance to solve the crisis situation in the sector, said Alexandru Slusari, Chairman of the National Union of Agricultural Producers' Associations UniAgroProtect.

 

During the Monday’s news conference at Infotag he said that at the end of the last week agrarians met Parliament Speaker Adrian Candu, where an agreement was reached on starting negotiations with representatives of agricultural producers’ associations.

 

“We have been informed about the Government and the Parliament’s readiness to support agriculture and promised that the set of measures in this concern will be developed until July 1 and voted until July 15. Among these are: canceling of the tax on profit; creation of mechanisms for providing cheap credits, changing in methods of providing money from the Agricultural Subsidy Fund, as well as methods of calculating prices on fuel; revision of the list of goods, which is charged with the reduced VAT; setting of a supervisory council for monitoring the spending of money for farmers. The parliamentary Standing Committee for Agriculture and Food Industry should gather, I guess, not later than May 27. As we hope, after all the rule-making procedures, the Parliament will take the final decision on the set of agrarians’ demands until the end of the summer session”, Slusari said.

 

He characterized the situation in the key branch as a pre-catastrophic one.

 

In response to accusations of political bias and partisanship of agriculture associations’ leaders, Slusari said that three of four key leaders are non-partisan.

 

“We did not prepare protests just for protests; we need to the attention of the authorities the understanding of the fact that the economy’s key branch is dying. A little more delay and it will be too late. We hope that after agreement with Candu the problem will start being addressed. So far, just the first step was done, but we are going for the dialog we were striving for so long time”, said Slusari, promising that if politicians talk away this situation again, next protests of agrarians will be radical and tough.

 

Infotag’s dossier: The Parliament created on Thursday an ad-hoc commission for developing and implementing measures of support in agriculture. The commission includes 10 MPs from all the parliamentary factions. Over April and March agrarians have protested several times in the majority of country’s raions, blocking several national roads.