Working Group No. 3 “Environment, Climate Change and Energy Security” of the National Platform of the EU’s Eastern Partnership Civil Society Forum asks that MP Vladimir Bolea’s proposal concerning the Nistru and the Prut should be rejected. In a statement addressed to the senior administration, representatives of the group said the bill does not take into account the hydrological regime changes witnessed the past decades and the continuous narrowing of rivers and actually refers to the extraction and sale of sand and gravel from the rivers on the pretext of developing navigation.
In a news conference at IPN, Lilia Curchi, local coordinator of Working Group No. 3, said it is regrettable that this legislative proposal was already approved by three parliamentary commissions, not yet by the expert commission. “As signatories of the statement, we ask and hope that the expert parliamentary commission will not endorse this bill. We respectfully ask the author to withdraw the bill from Parliament as this bill, as the statement provides, is based on false presumptions about the possibility of developing full navigation on the Nistru and the Prut in the current hydrological conditions. The bill is fully anti-ecological,” stated Lilia Curchi.
Ilia Trombitski executive director of the Eco-TIRAS International Environmental Association of River Keepers, said the bill provides for the wide use of the protection areas of the Nistru and the Danube and of the Prut, which were earlier protected by law for economic activity – building of temporary piers and access ways for these for exporting crops and other goods, for transport and passengers. In this regard, the bill suggests abandoning the environmental evaluation procedures and environmental impact assessments for all the proposed activities, such as permitting to use motorboats during the fish spawning period, removal of vegetation and extraction of sand and gravel. By this law, the sand and gravel extracted from the minor riverbeds are taken out of remit of the Subsoil Code, while their fate is not specified by the law.
The signatories of the statement note that the business entities that perform works to support the sailing line are exempted from paying compensation for the damage caused to the environment, which means that the UN “polluter pays” principle is not applied. According to them, the bill does not cover the hydrological regime changes witnessed the past decades and the continuous diminution of rivers and actually refers to the extraction and sale of sand and gravel from the rivers on the pretext of developing navigation that cannot be efficient in the current natural conditions. Furthermore, as it results from the informative note to the bill, the implementation of the law necessitates significant budget investments an alternative to which is the sale of sand and gravel, which is a well-known corrupt activity. The fact that owing to the building of hydropower plans on the rivers, the solid flow of sand and gravel was stopped is not taken into account. Consequently, extraction of these will lead to the clogging of rivers and to the loss of biodiversity, of the rivers’ capacity to clean themselves. This leads to higher prices for treating water for making it fit to drink.
The president of the Ecological Movement of Moldova Alecu Reniță, a member of Working Group No. 3, said this bill should not be adopted and should be town away. “Neither the economy of the Republic of Moldova nor the ecology or national interest will gain as a result of the promotion of such a bill that I must admit appears calmly every time the government is changed in Moldova. It is a bill that comes from the underground economy and is promoted by clans that we do not know directly, but that every time try to cheat the ecologists and also the government that needs to take a final decision,” stated Alecu Reniță.
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