BELARUS NEWS AND ANALYSIS

DATE:

Tuesday, October 25, 2005

Belarus back to growing nonradioactive crops

VIDUITSY, Belarus

The winter rye is already sprouting in the fields of the state cooperative farm here. The summer's crop - rye, barley and rapeseed - amounted to 1,400 tons. Best of all, the farm's director, Vladimir I. Pryzhenkov, said, none of it tested radioactive.

That is progress. The farm's 4,000 acres are nestled among some of the most contaminated spots on earth, the legacy of the worst nuclear accident in history: the explosion at Chernobyl Reactor No. 4 on April 26, 1986.

Nearly a quarter of Belarus, including some of its prime farmland, remains radioactive to some degree. Pryzhenkov's farm represents part of the government's efforts to put the contaminated lands back to use.

The farm, which is still state-owned, reopened two years ago with millions of dollars' worth of harvesters and other equipment provided by President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko's government.

A year before that, the checkpoints that once restricted access to this region, 150 miles from Chernobyl, disappeared. Families began returning.

Pryzhenkov, assigned here from another co-op in what he called "a promotion," has also begun breeding horses and cattle for beef, though not for milk. Milk produced here would be too dangerous for human consumption.

"This was all falling apart," he said as he drove a battered UAZ jeep over the farm's muddy, rutted roads. "There was nothing for the people to do here."

Lukashenko, a former collective-farm boss himself, declared last year that it was time to revive the contaminated regions. "Land should work for the country," he said.

His authoritarian decrees have prompted shock, fear and ridicule, but a scientific study released in September by seven U.N. agencies and the World Bank more or less agreed with him.

It concluded that Chernobyl's lasting effects on health and the environment had not proved as dire as first predicted. Lands where agriculture was banned or severely restricted can be safe for growing crops again, the report said, using techniques to minimize the absorption of radioactive particles into produce.

Source:

http://www.journalnow.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=WSJ%2FMGArticle%2FWSJ_BasicArticle&c=MGArticle&cid=1128767730531&path=!nationworld!section!article&s=1037645509161

Google