* Whereas Romania used to be one of the greatest producers of silk, nowadays its crops of silkworms are dying because we can no longer afford water and power for sericulture
* Romania went from being a founding member of the sericulture professional association, to not being able to afford to send our specialists to international seminars
* The few researchers in the field that are left haven"t been paid in half a year and can"t even afford to pay their bus fare to go to work
With its assets slowly gone to waste over the last twenty years, "Sericarom" SA, the only state owned company that raised silkworms, has seen its utilities disconnected, and runs the risk of entering bankruptcy in the coming two months, due to a debt to the state budget of 1.2 million lei.
The Tax Administration has seized the best assets of the company, and while the authorities are arguing over various plans to rescue the company, "Sericarom" has been left without water and electricity, with its bank accounts frozen, and Romania"s silkworm gene pool is in danger of being permanently lost, just as the silkworm harvest is under way.
A business worth tens of millions of Euros is at risk of becoming a simple memory, in a country that twenty years ago was the sixth largest silk cocoon producer in the world, and is still counted among the fifth largest silk producing countries in the European Union, next to countries like France and Italy.
The loss of our international prestige happens in the most embarrassing manner: Romania is a founding member of the International Sericulture Commission, set up in 1959, it pays a membership fee, but it did not have the money needed to send a representative to attend the latest reunion, which took place in France.
The situation is so dire that the company"s losses have all of a sudden grown to 220,000 lei, researchers h
