The compensation for animals culled amid the ongoing measures to combat the foot and mouth disease are set to ‘significantly increase’ following a meeting at the agriculture ministry, agricultural organisations said on Friday.

“Today’s meeting was hopeful, it seems that we are going to help our people and what we want to emphasize is that only with such meetings, serious, responsible ones, can we address the problem,” said agricultural union president Michalis Lytras.

Following Friday’s forth meting of the committee under the minister of agriculture, Lytras said they had made significant progress and were awaiting the final approval of the special technical committee to proceed with the compensation.

“We have raised the prices significantly [from the previous prices they had submitted to ministry],” he said.

Lytras said that the next stage in the negotiations will be the replacement and reactivation of livestock units in another committee.

“We don’t want to stop just with compensation. We want the livestock farming profession to become active again and various meetings will be held on how to help these people become active again,” he said.

Agricultural association president Kyriakos Kailas, on his part, emphasised that although the risk of infection is currently lower due to higher vaccination rates among the animals, the problem has not yet been overcome.

“Foot-and-mouth disease will stay with us for a few years until we get rid of it,” he said.

He stressed that vaccinations were needed at regular intervals to ensure that the animals had enough antibodies and were not contagious or infected by the virus.

Kailas noted that livestock farming is a significant sector, with 25 per cent of the workforce in the country employed in this industry, underscoring the government’s responsibility to safeguard this sector.

“The bottom line is that the government and the President of the Republic himself and the minister of agriculture want to help the people whom we saw yesterday protesting rightfully, despite the fact that gatherings are something that is prohibited and we all know that the virus is transmitted more easily through these gatherings and we must avoid them,” he said.