The damage caused by wildlife in Puglia is enormous, with wild boars destroying crops and attacking men and farmed animals, as well as wolves and wild dogs, starlings cancel out olive production and destroy pitches, hares devour vegetable fields, cormorants eat fish in aquaculture plants, green parrots feed on fruit and almonds and the sea killer, the blue crab which exterminates clams and mussels, with an estimated overall damage of over 30 million EUR.
This is the alarm raised by the assemblies organized simultaneously by Coldiretti in Puglia, with the participation of over 4 thousand farmers, to ask for immediate solutions, a crucial day for an organization that celebrates its 80th anniversary this year.
“Hence the request that bounces back from the Coldiretti assemblies to put an immediate stop to the proliferation of wild animals, giving farmers the opportunity to defend their lands, with the adoption of the extraordinary regional containment plan and effective regulatory tools to defend the territory from a real invasion”, says the president of Coldiretti Puglia, Alfonso Cavallo.
With Puglia invaded by 250 thousand wild boars, there is not only the plague, but there is an alarm for the safety of people in the countryside and in the city – reports Coldiretti Puglia – with herds pushing into urban centres, among parked cars, prams with children and elderly people going shopping, “with the areas of the Murgia of Bari and Taranto, of the Gargano and of the Dauno sub-Apennines – thunders the director of Coldiretti Puglia, Pietro Piccioni – having become the El Dorado of wild boars, with a worrying frequency of road accidents, the latest of which occurred only 48 hours ago in Chieuti in the province of Foggia, but they devastate the crops by devouring Altamura lentils. grass peas, broad beans, chickpeas and peas, broccoli, vegetables, newly sown seedlings of field beans and wheat, grapes especially on espalier vines, fruit shaking the trees, all the undergrowth and the biodiversity of the woods and parks”.
The packs of wild boars – underlines Coldiretti – are moving ever closer to homes and schools, even to parks, destroying crops, attacking animals, besieging stables, causing road accidents with deaths and injuries and scratching around in the waste with obvious risks for Health. The situation has become unsustainable in the city and in the countryside with incalculable economic damage to agricultural production but – underlines Coldiretti – the environmental balance of vast territorial ecosystems in areas of naturalistic value is also compromised with the loss of both animal and plant biodiversity.
This is – highlights the regional Coldiretti – only the tip of the iceberg because many do not report, discouraged by the bureaucratic delays and the conditions imposed by the insurance companies such as, for example, in addition to the traces on the car and on the asphalt, also the discovery of the animal carcass with which we encountered.
In this scenario, the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) has also launched an appeal to the states of the European Union asking for extraordinary measures to prevent wild boars from accessing food and reduce the number of animals to limit the risk of spreading the disease. African swine fever (PSA) which affects animals but not humans. The majority of citizens – concludes Coldiretti Puglia – consider the excessive presence of wild animals a real national emergency which affects the safety of people as well as the economy and work, especially in the most disadvantaged areas.
