Grasshoppers and bad weather: "Moment of great criticality for the agricultural sector"

The agricultural sector , especially in the territories of Nuorese, Oristano and Sassarese, is experiencing a moment of great criticality . "The municipal administrations of Ottana and Silanus have done well in declaring a state of natural disaster due to the rains of the last few days because either it is ruined due to the grasshoppers or due to bad weather that has violently plunged into different areas of the Ottana plain with rainfall tropical and hailstorms», underlined Michele Ena , president of Confagricoltura Nuoro and Ogliastra.

«It is very probable – he continued – that bad weather will perhaps be a decisive ally in containing the onslaught of locusts, which for almost three months have been coming to light in the heart of the island for the fifth consecutive year. If on the one hand, in fact, the torrential rains can contain the populations of locusts, on the other they have produced considerable damage to agricultural crops, above all those intended for maize and forage . Exceptional climatic events - ENA specified in reiterating what the regional president Paolo Mele has already said in recent days - are becoming increasingly ordinary, frequent and disruptive. The climate crisis is underway and we experience it every season and in all latitudes of the planet, especially in those on the border between geographical and climatic macro-areas such as the Mediterranean is for us, between the European and African continents. And it is precisely this condition of high business risk , which is growing worryingly year after year, which should require a general reflection guided by public institutions, with the Region in first place, to support the agri-food sector in preparing the necessary countermeasures".

Ena considers the creation of a programmatic and operational table "indispensable", "made up of agronomists and geologists, experts in climate change and engineers, who immediately deal with the management of the territory where the farm must once again be the protagonist. Therefore, if we don't immediately rethink, together with trade organizations, a new way of supporting production in the field and preventing all the widespread climatic disasters, there will be more and more companies that will give up on cultivating certain crops. If the Region, in collaboration with the government and the European Union, does not provide insurance instruments capable of promoting agriculture, under these new conditions, our countryside will continue to be abandoned with the consequent definitive loss of food self-sufficiency throughout within the EU: a tipping point that all the Member States of the Union have absolutely no intention of crossing and that we, the representatives of thousands of companies, will try to avoid at all costs," concluded Michele Ena.

(Unioneonline/ss)