Agriculture ministry plans to toughen responsibility for poisoning beers with pesticides
The Agricultural Policy and Food Ministry of Ukraine plans to toughen responsibility for beekeeping, acting Agricultural Policy and Food Minister Olha Trofimtseva said at a roundtable entitled "Farmers vs Beekeepers" held last week.
"We have a bill on the treatment of agricultural chemicals, in which we propose to strengthen the protection of the rights of beekeepers. A number of ministry orders are also being worked out to improve the conditions for the functioning of beekeepers," Trofimtseva said.
According to the data from the State Service of Ukraine on Food Safety and Consumers' Rights Protection, which was announced by its Head Volodymyr Lapa, 1,400 applications about bee poisoning were received in 2018, but only 54 were confirmed cases of pesticide poisoning. According to the Union of Beekeepers of Ukraine, in 2018, 45,000-46,000 bee colonies were killed.
As he said, the established communication between agricultural producers and beekeepers can significantly reduce the number of cases of bee poisoning. In particular, the agricultural holdings Mriya and Goodvalley signed memorandums with beekeepers and launched an SMS notification about the processing of fields.
According to Lapa, his authority is considering creating a unified public aggregator that would accumulate information on field processing from non-public systems.
He said that his authority would soon publish an updated version of the bill on veterinary medicine, which proposes to tighten the conditions for veterinary drugs. Also the food safety service completes the technical processing of the bill on quarantine plant protection.
According to Trofimtseva, the ministry intends to bring the beekeepers out of the shadows. According to her, the number of beekeepers in Ukraine is about 350,000-400,000, of which 2% are officially registered.
She said that unregistered beekeepers cannot receive partial compensation for the programs on government support of agriculture. However, she said that the ministry is studying the issue of relaxing the registration of apiaries.
