The purchase price of this year’s wheat in the Republika Srpska entity is certainly the highest in Bijeljina, the director of the city’s Agrarian Fund, Zlatan Lazarevic, said today.
“It turned out that the price, which we gathered around, is not such a problem,” Lazarevic said after a meeting of more than a hundred farmers with the member of the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Milorad Dodik, and the Minister of Agriculture, Forestry and Water Management of the Republika Srpska, Boris Pasalic, about the problems of agrarians.
Lazarevic told reporters that for the next sowing in October, an increase in incentives to 500 marks per hectare of wheat and an increase in allocations for agriculture from the budget of the Republika Srpska to 150 million marks were agreed.
“What has been presented as a big problem is the concession of state land, where farmers have complained that they pay high rents to individuals, and that those who receive concessions have very low rents,” said Lazarevic.
According to him, it was agreed to find a fair solution for the distribution of land for lease, as well as a subsidy through incentives for those who lease land from private individuals.
The president of the “Sela Semberije” Association, Bosko Radic, assessed after the meeting that it was easy to talk to smart people and said that the agreement was reached in three words.
He called the announced increase in incentives and the agricultural budget the right way to solve problems in agriculture and to preserve agriculture in the Republika of Srpska.
Young farmer Slobodan Aleksic from the Golo Brdo settlement in Bijeljina said at the meeting and in an address to journalists that he is one of the few guys from Bijeljina who decided to stay on his father’s farm and cultivate 20 hectares of land with his father and brother.
“I would like in the future if we get more land to cultivate, so that I don’t have to leave my country and the estate where my grandfather worked and my father, brother and I work,” said this twenty-five-year-old.
Aleksic said that he will not leave his property, although most of his peers are doing so, considering agriculture as a humiliating job.
“I’m not looking for another job, and it would help me if we got more land to cultivate,” said the young farmer.
