DStv Channel 403 Saturday, 02 November 2024

Floods wiped out quarter of Greek farm produce: experts

ATHENS - A quarter of Greece's annual agricultural production was wiped out in thedeadly flash floods triggered by Storm Daniel, which drenched the central region of Thessaly,  according to experts.

As government officials began the daunting task of mapping the damage dealt to the plain that feeds much of Greece, one pressing need was to dispose of tens of thousands of decomposing farm animals.

Out of over 110,000 dead sheep, goats, pigs, cows and chickens reported lost by farmers, fewer than half have been buried or incinerated, officials said.

Inspection crews were still unable to reach half the areas with reported dead livestock, the agriculture ministry said.

"The damage is difficult to fully assess at the moment, but according to the most optimistic scenario, 70 percent of the cotton crop and almost all of the clover has been damaged," said farmer Athanasios Karaiskos, president of the farm cooperative of the town of Farsala.

The region's apple and kiwi productions have also been hit, while warehouses storing large quantities of wheat were flooded.

Some parts of Thessaly received "an astonishing 910 millimetres of rain" more than a year's rainfall in normal conditions, said Katerina Kasimati, an agriculture engineer at the Agricultural University of Athens.

"These floods caused nearly 25 percent of the year's crop production to be lost, amounting to losses in the hundreds of millions of euros," she told AFP.

Commonly called 'the Plain' in Greece, Thessaly accounts for nearly a third of the country's arable land and over 18 percent of its crops.

"Farmers and particularly livestock breeders are in a state of panic," said Christos Yannadakis, vice-president of the union of Greek farm cooperatives.

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