Damages of over 25 million, milk and lamb year at risk .
Coldiretti raises yet another alarm over the bluetongue , which has brought Sardinian farmers to their knees.
For the association, a state of emergency must be declared and a permanent crisis unit must be created to combat the virus that is killing sheep. That's not enough, we also need "a task force to manage the compensation procedures, necessary to support Sardinian farmers who are now on their knees due to damages that are already certain to be over 25 million euros."
The spread of the virus has reached impressive proportions: according to the latest bulletin from the Zooprophylactic Institute, there are over 124 thousand infected heads, more than 17 thousand deaths and 3,028 outbreaks .
And while Councilor Bartolazzi is confident in the cold ("we need temperatures to drop below 15 degrees"), Coldiretti is calling for immediate interventions to stem the spread of the disease and restore livestock farmers.
A situation "at the levels of 2000" , explain the president and director of Coldiretti Sardinia, Battista Cualbu and Luca Saba. "At that time we experienced a dramatic situation that now we risk worsening further". Today, they underline, " Sardinian farmers are paying for the silence of the past months, since the beginning of the year we have repeatedly asked the Region to intervene to orchestrate a preventive strategy to combat it , we knew that the situation would explode".
The association is calling for an urgent session of the regional council to allocate funds, "necessary to compensate companies now on their knees due to the loss of their animals but above all to compensate for future losses, the result of numerous abortions and the expected drop in milk" .
Interventions to be combined with prevention ones: «A constant disinfestation of the countryside to eradicate the insect and an intervention to definitively unblock the circulation of vaccines also for cattle ».
(Unioneonline/L)
