Romania"s silkworms crops, dying of thirst

• Whereas Romania used to be one of the greatest producers of silk, nowadays its crops of silkworms are dying because we can no longer afford water and power for sericulture

• Romania went from being a founding member of the sericulture professional association, to not being able to afford to send our specialists to international seminars

• The few researchers in the field that are left haven"t been paid in half a year and can"t even afford to pay their bus fare to go to work

With its assets slowly gone to waste over the last twenty years, "Sericarom" SA, the only state owned company that raised silkworms, has seen its utilities disconnected, and runs the risk of entering bankruptcy in the coming two months, due to a debt to the state budget of 1.2 million lei.

The Tax Administration has seized the best assets of the company, and while the authorities are arguing over various plans to rescue the company, "Sericarom" has been left without water and electricity, with its bank accounts frozen, and Romania"s silkworm gene pool is in danger of being permanently lost, just as the silkworm harvest is under way.

A business worth tens of millions of Euros is at risk of becoming a simple memory, in a country that twenty years ago was the sixth largest silk cocoon producer in the world, and is still counted among the fifth largest silk producing countries in the European Union, next to countries like France and Italy.

The loss of our international prestige happens in the most embarrassing manner: Romania is a founding member of the International Sericulture Commission, set up in 1959, it pays a membership fee, but it did not have the money needed to send a representative to attend the latest reunion, which took place in France.

The situation is so dire that the company"s losses have all of a sudden grown to 220,000 lei, researchers haven"t received their salaries in six months, and the five or six experts that still remain have come to the point where they can"t even afford to take the bus to work.

Not even the money for the company"s research projects is coming on time, even though the funding for the company was cut by 80% in 2009.

• Just lots of empty talk

"Sericarom" may be rescued at the last minute, by being converted into the Băneasa Sericulture Research Station, but the Ministry of Agriculture is refusing to pass the draft government bill, claiming this would leave it burdened with another debt riddled company.

The management of "Sericarom" claims that if the company were to become a research station, two problems would be solved at once, by allowing it to receive funding from the state as well as providing better control over the assets of the company, which were for the most part sold off over the last twenty years due to the appetite for real estate investments in the Băneasa area.

"If the Ministry of Agriculture won"t allow us to become a research station and we do not get an exemption from the Tax Administration allowing us to sell the one of the assets which it has seized, for which we have an offer of about 1 million Euros, in order to pay off our debts and resume operations, < Sericarom > will go bankrupt within two months", the company"s manager, eng. Gabriel Lenghel said for BURSA.

The head of Sericarom revealed that if the plan to rescue the company were to succeed, he plans to make several investments in the company"s Calafat branch in the county of Dolj, where the company still owns a plot of land which grows mulberry trees, to allow it to continue production. The division for the preservation of the gene pool would be kept in Bucharest, in Băneasa, where the company owns 2 more hectares of land.

All it would take for the recovery of the sector is an investment of 2 million lei.

Is it really that much for a country that has ambitions?