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| THE BISTROE CANAL- AGAIN IN THE NEWS 21/05/2008 |
| (2008-05-21) |
| Last updated: 2008-05-22 21:41 EET |
Awaited for some time, the announcement that the Ukrainian authorities pledge to halt works on the by now infamous Bistroe canal in the Danube Delta, reached Bucharest on Tuesday.
The person who made the announcement was the secretary general of the Espoo Convention, Wiek Schrage, who took advantage of a meeting in Romania’s capital focused on the environment in a cross-border context to make a Ukrainian official promise that his country would not start works on the second stage of the canal until it meets its international obligations.
A persevering but still not a very convincing candidate to entering the European Union and NATO, Ukraine risks drowning its ambitions of international respectability in the Bistroe canal. This deep-water route going across the Danube Delta nature reserve, on the Romanian-Ukrainian border, was advertised in Kiev as a successful endeavor that will eliminate the quasi-Romanian monopoly on river transport in the area and will secure significant financial benefits. Initiated by the former president Leonid Kuchma, the project was inherited, after the so-called “orange revolution” by the Victor Yushchenko - Yulia Tymoshenko tandem.
Both Kushma’s and Yushchenko’s regimes turned a deaf ear to the warnings and protests of the international community over the harmful consequences on the Delta, a unique area included on the UNESCO heritage list and stretching mostly on Romanian territory. Bucharest was first to warn that the Ukrainian project could upset the ecological balance irreversibly. The Danube Delta is home to 1,000 species of plants, 300 species of birds, including Europe’s largest colony of pelicans, as well as species of sturgeon facing extinction.
The conclusion of experts from the United Nations, the European Union and the United States, not to mention international environmental organisations, was clear: the canal can destroy the habitat of migrating birds and fish, while the alteration of the river bed can lead to the accumulation of sediments where the river flows into the Black Sea. In the beginning, the Ukrainian authorities tried to strike back running an ad campaign which describes the canal as the “marriage of economy and ecology”.
But Ukraine failed to convince even its own citizens of this is, and many Ukrainian environmental organisations called for the closing down of the canal and for independent studies on its impact on the Delta. Ukraine only recently agreed to do it, when, analysts say, it seems to have understood not only the political, but also the financial cost of its ambitions. The need for expensive dredging works, due to silting, would basically double Ukraine’s costs.
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