Slovak president signs amendment to protect vineyards

Slovak President Ivan Gasparovic signed amendment to the Act on the Protection and Use of Agricultural Land in Slovakia on Tuesday, reported by news agency TASR. The amendment was expected to be enforced on February 27. According to Agriculture Ministry, the amendment is aim at preventing degradation of vineyards in Slovakia. "The goal of the amendment is to stop omitting of the existing laws, speculative requests for soil status change from vineyard to other types of agricultural land, which can eventually lead to further change until the soil cleared as available for urbanization," stated by the ministry. The ministry claims that in the last decade, the agricultural land used as vineyards have been laid idle. It seems that this behavior is a pretreatment of the land, so it can be later changed to a building plot. A total of 742 hectares of vineyards have been lost in the last 12 years, 62 hectares yearly, said the ministry.