Summary of newsmakers from the previous day 9.8.2005

Municipalities want again to cut in Šumava

When a former management of the National park Šumava cut trees affected with wood engraver in the first, most valuable zones of protected area, people from the ecological Hnutí Duha protected the trees by own bodies against power-saws. Now the history repeats, although to the contrary and meanwhile less dramatically. New management of park stopped the cutting in the first zones. And a half of twenty two Šumava mayors asked, in sharply formulated letter, the Premiere Jiří Paroubek (ČSSD) for doing something with the matter. Mayors write that due to “no intervention against pests spruce forest died at acreage of more than 1,5 thousand hectares”. They warn that the situation in Šumava forests can worsen further and refuse so that the park would become a laboratory for ecological experiments.

Veleba: Harvests delay; if weather does not improve, yields would fall

Harvests delay due to rains and if the weather does not improve, yields of plants would decrease, said a president of the Agrarian chamber Jan Veleba to the ČTK today. According to the chamber’s investigation meanwhile farmers harvested about 30 percents from the whole acreage of 1,5 million hectares of cereals, and roughly 70 percents from 267 000 hectares of rape. According to July estimation of the Czech Statistical Office farmers will harvest about 7,3 million tons of basic cereals this year which is in average by 11 percents less than in the last year when the harvest was extraordinary. Rape harvest will probably decrease by 17,2 percent per 774 000 ton this year due to less yield. According to Veleba low prices of cereals remain; tradesmen offer still about 2000 crowns for a ton of feeding cereals and 2300 to 2500 crowns for food-processing ones for a ton.

Country future: Mayors prefer living development

A fifth of polled mayors would agree with an eventual connecting of other municipality to their own. But only 1,5 percent admitted a possibility to connect own municipality to some other. It was a reaction of more than eleven hundreds of mayors who answered in the investigation of the Sociological laboratory of the Czech University of Agriculture. Where the country is in fact? The answer can sound quite surprisingly: The country is everywhere around us. Many definitions and criteria exist for a determination of a country. They agree in that the countryside is a space – a landscape and in it living people. Mostly it is also characterized by an agricultural use of land and a low settlement density.

Season started in distilleries, however fruit is less

Plum brandy will be this year an exotic brandy. And not only it. A season of burning of fruit spirits which in Ústí region starts right now will be poorer than the last year’s one, operators of distilleries agree. Fruit has been damaged by moulds and spring frosts. In last years people burnt many cherries, apricots, sour cherries, apples and pears; this year obviously cider-brandy and pear-brandy will prevail on grower’ s tables. Growers know very well that after several good years a worse season comes. In past an eventual absence of the most valuable plums were replaced by other kinds of fruit. However, this year is also poor of cherries, sour cherries and apricots.