LMP urges government to help ecological farming
The opposition LMP party has called on the government "not to sell arable land" but lease plots to farmers willing to cultivate them ecologically.
LMP co-leader Erzsebet Schmuck told a press conference on Thursday that the government had already offered 22,000 hectares of state-owned land for sale and was planning to sell another 40,000 hectares to increase budget revenues.
Schmuck said similar sales in 2015-16 had “primarily increased the large estates further” and predicted the same to happen now. “This runs contrary to the European Union’s goal of increasing ecological farming to 25 percent of the community’s total farming area by 2030,” she insisted. She added that currently a mere 6 percent of Hungary’s arable land was under ecological cultivation.
