Vine growers in Bulgaria are already uprooting their vines on a massive scale and are fully ready for a strike unless the State takes urgent measures to prevent a collapse of their business and adopts a targeted policy rather than just short-term measures.
At a BTA-hosted news conference here on Thursday, members of the National Association of Bulgarian Vine Growers (NABVG) said they are dissatisfied with the way the Bulgarian administration allocates funding because they do not see a clear system for the distribution of subsidies and cost-based support.
"We want a strategy for the development of vine growing over the next 30 years, and we want to elaborate this strategy together with the Ministry of Agriculture," said NABVG Board Chair Atanas Vassilev, who owns a vineyard estate in the area of Sevlievo (Central Bulgaria). "A vineyard takes at least 25 years to cultivate," he argued. Vassilev noted that the subsidy of BGN 450 per hectare that vine growers get is the same as the one earmarked for perennial nut crops (walnut and almond trees). "The support for 25 hectares of vines equals the sum paid for 10 hens," he pointed out.
"Bulgarian viticulture has been shrinking over the last ten years and is dying. We are calling on the Agriculture Ministry to take a statesmanlike approach and save it," said NABVG Board member Daniel Angelov. He stressed that his costs have already reached the European level, and now he wants his income level to catch up.
In the estimate of another NABVG Board member, Milko Yanev, if Bulgaria loses 20,000 hectares of vineyards in two or three years' time, this will be tantamount to a BGN 4 million loss of national capital.
The Association members told the media that they had conferred in Brussels with EU Agriculture Commissioner Janusz Wojciechowski, who had been unfamiliar with the condition of their sector and promised an analysis and guidelines. They also met with Deputy Agriculture Minister Todor Dzhikov, who promised to send them a letter detailing the distribution of the budget. The letter has not yet arrived.
Vine growing requires some 335 days of field work annually, more than any other branch of farming. Support has been paid in connection with the COVID pandemic and the war in Ukraine, but since 2015 this has been the only sector without a national top-up to the EU subsidy.
Vineyard estate owner Selim Issa said that until five or six years ago the purchase prices of grapes were on a par with costs. Over the last three or four years, however, the prices have reverted to their levels of ten years ago, whereas the costs have skyrocketed.
At the news conference, producers complained of yet another problem: the import of subsidized grapes which undercuts local produce. Vassilev said that the price of wine on international exchanges has dropped to EUR 0.45/litre this year, which is impossible unless the inputs are subsidized.
Adverse weather during the present agricultural year has made life even more difficult for vine growers. Angelov said that the situation in the Northwest is very bad. He himself has incurred over 80% losses after hailstorms and torrential rains ruined his crop.
/ZH/
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