Coldiretti Puglia returns to ask for the removal of dried olive trees in Salento where 12 thousand hectares would be at risk of desertification and fires.
"After 7 years the province of Lecce continues to die of bureaucracy" highlights the association which requests an urgent meeting with the regional councilor for agriculture Donato Pentassuglia to define the certification that allows the elimination of dried olive trees, without waiting for the outcome of the preliminary investigations of the applications, "with the unacceptable administrative paralysis that is causing the regeneration of the Salento area to be postponed by another year, after Xylella has caused the 21 million olive trees, causing disastrous effects”.
The delays in the investigations of the approx 600 individual applications for the explantation and replanting of olive trees, for which the public administration must guarantee - Coldiretti Puglia insists - the right to help for those companies present in the ranking that ask to eliminate damaged and no longer productive olive groves, and to carry out the cultivation operations useful for replanting, because the tools for the verification of the number of damaged olive trees to be eliminated and to be replanted are already in the possession of the public administration, such as the 2019 orthophotos, the olive land registry and the Agea databases.
This is an unacceptable situation which is delaying the olive-growing recovery of the area affected by Xylella by another year. In fact, the olive tree must be planted within the spring period and, this being the case, there is the risk that only a limited part of the companies will be able to begin the replanting of the olive trees in the infected area with the funds made available by the Interministerial Decree”.
