The reconstruction of the national irrigation structure could be financed by issuing bonds and selling them to the population, sources in the sector say. The recent statements of Daniel Botănoiu, secretary of state in the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (MADR), according to which the government is reviewing the possibility of amending the legislation in the agricultural sector in order to stimulate investments in irrigation, seem to corroborate these information in the market.
Mr. Botănoiu did not specify how the legislation in the sector would be changed. He only said that if the investments in irrigation would remain at their current level, then any strategy for developing the agricultural sector would fail.
The Minister of Agriculture, Daniel Constantin, recently said that he was talking to the European Commission about the accessing of an amount of 1 billion Euros in order to restore the irrigation infrastructure which existed 23 years ago.
The 1 billion Euros number was determined by the experts of the World Bank, as needed for the reconstruction and rebuilding of the irrigation system for approximately 800,000 hectares of a total arable surface of 9.3 million hectares. Currently, about 300,000 hectares are irrigated, compared to about 3 million in 1989.
Considering that the irrigation infrastructure needs massive investments to be rehabilitated, which the European funds would not be enough to fully cover, the authorities are also considering the issuing of bonds to attract domestic investments, our sources are saying. Thus, the farmers could form partnerships to invest in the modernization of the irrigation systems. The farmer associations could prepare a prospectus for investing in irrigation for the issuing of bonds with a specified maturity and a greater fixed interest rate than the interest paid by bank deposits. The
