After breaking the water blockade, rice cultivation is resumed in Crimea
Rice planting has begun in Crimea. This year, a little more than 630 hectares were allocated for sowing - this is less than 5% of the previous area of rice paddies.
Acting Minister of Agriculture of Crimea Alime Zaredinova reported this, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
“With the shutdown of the water supply in the North Crimean Canal, 38 farms stopped cultivating this crop and switched to growing drought-resistant crops. Currently, rice farmers are putting the reclamation systems in order; next year, farmers plan to significantly increase the area under rice,” Zaredinova noted.
For eight years without Dnieper water, rice farmers switched to other crops, so it is impossible to restore all 13 thousand hectares of rice paddies overnight. The current sowing will be used as seeds for next year's plantings.
The largest areas for rice are allocated in the Krasnoperekopsky and Razdolnensky regions of Crimea. Local farmers are dealing with seeds from the Krasnodar region for the first time, and in the future they hope to restore economic ties with rice growers in the Kherson region, since the local seeds gave Crimean rice unique taste qualities.
Every year 80 thousand tons of rice were harvested in Crimea, and only 15 thousand tons remained on the peninsula. The rest of the harvest went to retail chains in Ukraine. Two-thirds of the 700 million cubic meters of water coming through the North Crimean Canal were spent on rice paddies.
After its closure, officials started talking about a “water stranglehold” due to the cultivation of rice, which the Krasnodar region, which annually harvests 1 million tons, is quite capable of supplying to saturate the market. However, the rice paddies had another function - fresh water did not allow salty subsoil waters to rise close to the surface, which turn the Northern Crimea into salt marshes with sparse vegetation.
After sowing, the rice paddies will be filled with water. They will also release fish fry there, as they did before 2014. The harvest will be in September.
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