(13.01.2011)
Annu­al press con­fer­ence of the Asso­ci­a­tion of Friends of the Ger­­man-Pol­ish Euro­pean Nation­al Park Unteres Oder­tal e. V., the chair­man of the board, Thomas Berg, explained, among oth­er things, the following: 

“The past year 2010 was a par­tic­u­lar­ly suc­cess­ful one for our Nation­al Park Asso­ci­a­tion. He was able to acquire 20 hectares of agri­cul­tur­al land and is still very inter­est­ed in buy­ing more land in the nation­al park region. The resources required for this are available.

In addi­tion, the asso­ci­a­tion estab­lished itself as a suc­cess­ful part-time farmer in 2010, where it can­not find a com­pe­tent part­ner for its nature con­ser­va­tion work. But that only affect­ed one large com­pa­ny in the south. Oth­er­wise, the asso­ci­a­tion sticks to its strat­e­gy of leas­ing its land to local farm­ers sub­ject to nature con­ser­va­tion require­ments. All attempts by the allied large agrar­i­ans to pre­vent the asso­ci­a­tion from acquir­ing land with a con­struct­ed right of first refusal failed short­ly before Christ­mas before the Frank­furt / Oder region­al court. In this con­text, we refer to our press release 01/2011 of Jan­u­ary 4th, 2011.

The coöper­a­tion with the nation­al park admin­is­tra­tion is pos­i­tive. After the hedge project on the areas of the old Criewen estate had been joint­ly suc­cess­ful, it has now been pos­si­ble to obtain fund­ing for the con­struc­tion of wells in order to be able to graze the valu­able dry grass­land with sheep and goats. The for­est con­ver­sion in Zone Ib areas also went smooth­ly. The fees already paid for the water and soil asso­ci­a­tions for des­ig­nat­ed total reserves (Zone Ia) have actu­al­ly been reim­bursed to us after a long and com­pli­cat­ed appli­ca­tion process in accor­dance with the Bran­den­burg Water Act (Bbg­WG). We want a sim­ple and fair pro­ce­dure with a fixed pay­ment claim, but no pay­ments to us as sup­pli­cants, which are then approved or not accord­ing to good behav­ior and cash sit­u­a­tion. The three plan-request dates with the three plan­ning offices com­mis­sioned by the land con­sol­i­da­tion author­i­ty also went properly.

How­ev­er, the dis­tri­b­u­tion of the club and state areas to Zone I and Zone II has not yet been clar­i­fied. After the nego­ti­a­tions were bro­ken off by the old gov­ern­ment in June 2009, we now assume that the land reor­ga­ni­za­tion author­i­ty will com­ply with the clear legal sit­u­a­tion will decide. Oth­er­wise we reserve the right to take fur­ther legal action; four more are already pend­ing in court, and one more is also fore­see­able because of a “final use cer­tifi­cate” required by the min­istry (MUGV), for which there is no legal basis. 

For the com­ing year, the asso­ci­a­tion wish­es that bison be kept on the edge of the nation­al park. This only sur­viv­ing Euro­pean wild cat­tle has belonged to the region for thou­sands of years and fits in well with a nation­al park. The bison can of course only be kept in a large gate. Local, agri­cul­tur­al part­ners should take over this task in a tried and test­ed man­ner, and we will encour­age and sup­port them to the best of our abil­i­ty, true to our principles. ”

Thomas Berg
CEO