The House agriculture committee on Tuesday requested the presence of the agriculture minister at its next meeting to discuss using Memi lake for Xyliatou farmers.

MPs discussed the issue of making Memi lake available for irrigation by farmers currently using Xyliatos reservoir.

The issue was examined ex officio following a proposal by MPs.

Disy MP Savia Orphanidou said using water from Memi had been raised before.

“We have been waiting for answers from the agriculture ministry for a month and there is no answer on how we will support either our rural areas or our farmers. Today we heard generalities again, we heard technical issues again. There is no political decision at this time on how the area will be supported,” she added.

Thus, the MPs requested that Agriculture Minister Maria Panayiotou attend the committee meeting next week “to tell us exactly how farmers who see their crops perishing every day will be supported […] and the solutions, in the short-term so the crops don’t dry out and in the long-term for the irrigation of the area, as well as other areas in western Nicosia.”

“At the end of the day, this is a political issue and you should deal with it as such,” Orphanidou added.

Akel MP Christos Christofides said that “unfortunately, today, we heard the same thing from the agriculture ministry, that there is no solution to the huge issue of the destruction of plantations in the Xyliatos region.”

“We held sessions, they asked for a fortnight from the last session to come and bring proposals and they came today and we have no proposals. So, the picture is this: The plantations, the trees in the Xyliatos region – and we are talking about large areas – are being destroyed, if they have not already been destroyed,” he said.

He added that “it is now July and since February the agriculture ministry has been studying the issue, we have no solutions.”

Dipa MP Alecos Tryfonidis said the aim was to find a way to process the water from Memi lake and use it to water the trees and crops in the area.

“Unfortunately, once again, the representative of the Water Development Department had no solution and attributed the delays to the Urban Planning Department and this has angered both the members of the committee and other MPs who attended the session,” he said.

Tryfonidis said MPs had recently visited the area and seen fruit trees perishing or yielding poor produce, while water was being sent to other businesses, such as slaughterhouses, which “supposedly have their own wells”.

He added that the MPs expected the ministry and water department to present solutions at next week’s meeting, such as increasing the water for irrigation, utilising private boreholes or pumping water from Memi lake.

“If this situation continues, we will have a huge environmental disaster in the area and nothing in the future will bring back this rich natural environment that exists in the Xyliatos area. Also, the residents who are involved in agriculture there will stop working,” Tryfonides concluded.