Several dozen environmentalists staged a counter-protest in Vilnius on Wednesday, asking the government not to relax environmental protections opposed by farmers. Thousands of farmers came to Vilnius this week to protest the government's agriculture policies.
They are calling on the government not to make concessions during talks with farmers at the expense of environmental protections. The activists are holding banners with information about the extinction of bird species, climate change data, and why it is necessary to preserve endangered grasslands.
Edmundas Greimas of the Lithuanian Fund for Nature says that the ecological situation in agriculture has been deteriorating over the last 20 years amid intensifying farming and a lack of sustainable solutions. And when the government decides to take measures, farmers do not take this into account.
“I do understand that farmers are unhappy, and maybe the measures are radical, maybe they are too sudden, maybe they should have been taken in smaller steps, but we, as representatives of society and nature, do not like it, we do not like the fact that biodiversity is disappearing, that they plough up to the edge of a ditch or a stream, and that all the fertilisers are getting there,” Greimas told BNS.
“More and more fertilisers are flowing from Lithuania into the Baltic Sea, causing blooms, and all countries are concerned, nobody knows how to solve the problem. The Environment Ministry has proposed three-meter water protection zones, but farmers say they can’t do a single meter and they want to plough everywhere,” he added.
Around 3,000 farmers are protesting against the government’s agricultural policy outside the government office in central Vilnius on Wednesday. Their demands include continuing tax cuts on fuel and ditching stricter regulation on protection zones and grasslands, as well as higher raw milk prices.
Further reading
Newsletter
Every Friday morning.
