Akel says agriculture minister must ‘resign or be sacked’

Akel on Friday said Agriculture Minister Maria Panayiotou must “resign or be sacked”, lambasting her response to the wildfires which tore through the Limassol district last summer, water shortages, and the recent outbreak of foot and mouth disease in the Larnaca district.

“The chain of failures and incompetence in her entire area of responsibility is damaging the country,” it said, before adding that while the Limassol fire was “the biggest disaster in the annals of the state”, “no one took responsibility for the tragic management of them”.

On the matter of water shortages, the party said that “it is not only not solved, it is worsening day by day”, and warned that “imminent water cuts” are to follow as a result”, before turning its attention to the foot and mouth outbreak.

“Now, foot and mouth disease has developed into a crisis and the country’s livestock industry is suffering an unprecedented blow since measures were not taken in a timely manner,” it said.

However, it added, “on each occasion, the minister, and the government, not only did not take responsibility, she and they try to blame everyone else”, saying that “now, she is blaming farmers, the people who are currently losing their livelihoods and the hard work of a lifetime”.

“We wonder what else needs to happen for the minister and Mr Christodoulides to realise that she must be removed from her position,” it said.

In her most recent public intervention on the matter of foot and mouth disease, she promised that “no one will be left behind” and stressed that she and the government have undertaken a “comprehensive framework of measures to effectively support the affected sectors”.

To this end, she said she is in “continuous and direct” contact with stakeholders, and in “constant collaboration with scientific experts and European institutions”.

On the issue of water, she has championed the installation of desalination units, with the number of operational desalination units on the island set to rise to nine by the end of next month.

However, this has garnered criticism, with coastal engineer Xenia Loizidou having slammed the policy as an “incoherent panic solution”.

Meanwhile, she had come under fierce criticism during the Limassol wildfire, firstly for saying that “the only way we could have prevented the fire was for it not to have started” – a statement deemed insensitive by some.

Later in the summer, after she had testified before a joint session of the House agriculture, environment, and interior committees, Disy MP Kyriakos Hadjiyiannis said that she and her permanent secretary Andreas Gregoriou had both misled parliament in their testimonies.

It had been widely rumoured that she would be relieved of her duties during an autumn cabinet reshuffle, though when President Nikos Christodoulides eventually did perform the reshuffle in December, she remained in post.

She remains the only cabinet minister who belongs to Edek, one of the three parties which supported Christodoulides’ 2023 election campaign alongside Diko and Dipa, with this fact irking party leader Nikos Anastasiou after December’s reshuffle.

He said at the time that he had hoped the party would be rewarded with a second ministry, saying “we had expected that the president … would see Edek in a better light”, but swiftly ruled out withdrawing from the government.