Perioada de derulare: 07/31/2006 - 01/30/2007

Descrierea proiectului:

Background

Romania finds itself closer than ever to the EU integration. A series of important events that took place this year, makes the fight for GMO Free regions a priority.

At the European Level, the European Commision continues to make pressures for a coexistance regulation wich allows a contamination with GMOs of 0.9 % in conventional and organic crops and EU Agriculture Ministers are set to adopt measures that will allow irreversible contamination of Europe’s food and environment.

Given the results accomplished in the previous project GMO Free Regions – lobby campaign follow-up, we decided to keep the GMO Free Regions campaign strategy, at the local level. The local authorities wich got involved in the project proven to be very opened and carried out with great interest the responsabilities assumed by signing the GMO Free Zone Declarations. In the same time, our message got directly to the farmers and interested consumers.

Since the news about the first GMO Free Region established in Romania went public, we received positive signals coming from local authorities from 4 regions in Romania: Valcea, Cluj, Maramures, Sibiu.


The purpose of this project is to continue the previous project and further make the local authorities aware of the risks posed by GMOs to convince and to enforce them to take practical measures to protect their regions in the new context of coexistence.

Objectives:

* extend the already established GMO Free Region with at least 15 municipalities declared as “GMO Free Zones”;
* at least 30 well informed mayours/local-councils in the targeted regions;
* further develop the information dissemination network and the visibility of the “GMO-free regions” concept.

Target area: The area targeted by this project is mainly situated in the central-western part of Transylvania. One of the four regions we choose is located in the south of Romania.

The area consists of four regions (counties): Valcea, Cluj, Maramures, Sibiu.

Three of these regions are situated in the central-western part of Romania where sustained rural development activities have been carried out, some of them still going on. An important part of the local income is based on agro-tourism and small scale agriculture.

The 4th region, in the southern part of the country, has a strategic importance within the GMO-free regions project. The important aspect is the geographic localtion – southern plane - one of the most suitable areas for intensive agriculture and obviously GM crops. The local auhtorities and the population as well are not aware of the risks posed by GMO’s and the what they could do to protect their environment. This southern region is also chosen in order to asess the interrest of local authorities from regions with large scale agriculture towards GMO-free regions.