The deadline for rectifying the situation expired yesterday, December 15, 2020

Ukrainian Agri Council (UAC) appealed to the Prime Minister of Ukraine Denys Shmyhal to pay attention to the situation around the beginning of the 2021 irrigation season in Mykolaiv and Kherson regions immediately. Farmers in these regions risk being without water for irrigation. We are talking about 36 thousand hectares of irrigated land and 150 hundred agricultural enterprises that use water for irrigation.

According to the appeal, water for watering the fields enters the irrigation system from the Inhulets River. It also discharges mine water from the Svystunov beam, where it comes from the mining and processing combines of the Kryvyi Rih basin during the year. In order for the river water to be suitable for irrigation after the mine water, the Inhulets riverbed is washed away: the flow of water from the Karachunivsk Reservoir pushes out the salt prism that remains after the mine water. Further washing of the riverbed during the entire growing season - from the ending of March to the beginning of October - allows you to keep the river water in a suitable condition for irrigation.

“In order for these processes to take place, the individual regulations for periodic discharge of excess return waters of mining enterprises of Kryvbas in the intervegetation period and the regulations for washing the riverbed and ecological rehabilitation of the Inhulets River are approved annually. It takes about three months to completely discharge mine water from the beam. To make it to March, this work has to begin in early December. The deadline for the start of work expired yesterday, December 15, 2020" this information is mentioned in the statement.

Despite the fact that the regulations are ready, the Ministry of Environmental Protection and Natural Resources of Ukraine does not approve them and does not submit them to the Cabinet of Ministers, thus provoking the disruption of the 2021 irrigation season. In addition, this in turn will lead to catastrophic consequences: in fact, agricultural production of the entire region will be destroyed, the state will not receive hundreds millions of UAH in taxes, country's export potential will be severely damaged.

Andrii Myshkin, director of the public association "Association of Water Network Users", emphasizes that Svystunov beam will no longer be completely devastated due to broken deadlines and warns of catastrophic consequences:

"Nowadays, the regulations have not been signed and that means it is impossible to completely devastate the Svystunov beam before the start of the growing season. Moreover, we have this situation for the last three or four years. The rest of the mine water leads to the fact that they go into groundwater, through which they still fall into Inhulets. As a result, harmful substances exceed the norm by 3-4 times. We cannot use this water for irrigation. That means, the fact of non-signing of regulations entails the disruption of the irrigation season in 2021. In addition, since the beam is already filled, the mining and processing combines of the Kryvyi Rih basin will have no place to discharge mine water. And this is a critical situation, because if we don't do it, the mines can just collapse,” Andrii Myshkin explains.