Summary of newsmakers of the previous day – 10.10. 2006

Opponents: Intention to delimit places for new dams will threaten hundreds of municipalities

According opponents hundreds of municipalities will be endangered with a prepared Plan of main drainage basins which among others delimits 201 localities suitable for building of new dams. Critics consider the intention to delimitate places for so many reservoirs as megalomaniac and mostly unreasonable. The Ministry of Agriculture reports that it is dealt only with a preservation of suitable territories, especially against fundamental building interventions as highways and factories. Reservoirs would be built only in the extreme, where necessary, which could result mainly from climatic changes. Public discussion takes place today in Prague and critics covered with the initiative ‘Stop to dam’ came to express their disagreement armed with slogan banners “Finally we will glance off the bottom” or “We want to live here not to swim”.

French prepare small viticultural revolution

The French want to conquer positions on the world wine market which they have lost in last years. Some of them welcome as a revolution the permission of the European Commission to use wooden shavings for ripening of wine instead of traditional barrels. This method has to be forbidden in France still recently. In spite of the permission concern only the category of local wine (vin de pays), the French expect re-conquest of some positions which so called new producer countries have taken them on the world market.

Owners of forests can lose millions

If the European Union (EU) approves a new Czech Rural Development Program (PRV) in its current form, Czech owners of forest would lose millions crowns from its subventions. It is owing to contentions between the Ministry of Environment (MŽP) and the Ministry of Agriculture (MZe). The new version of PRV for years 2007 – 2013, approved by the government in August and counting with the EU support in height of 73 milliard crowns, ranges among condition for receiving the subvention a rule so that forest firms leave a certain amount of trees per hectare to rot. Foresters consider it as unacceptable.

LCR disagree categorically with SPLH declaration

Many false statements are contained in a press declaration of the Association of Entrepreneurs in Forest Management (SPLH) from the 6th October this year in which SPLH treats to the state enterprise Lesy CR (LCR) with an arbitral procedure regarding invalidity of contract for forest works. It results from statement of Tomáš Vyšohlíd, the spokesman of LCR. According him selective procedures for supplies of forest services for one year are a standardly used tool in Europe – for example in Bavarian and Irish forests. “LCR solves in this way only a transitive period of the year 2007, however, generally they prefer middle-term tenders”, Vyšohlíd emphasized.