Macedonia's Tree Campaign Puts Down Roots

Skopje mayor Koce Trajanovski planted pine trees on Vodno Mountain

Thousands of Macedonians planted seedlings at 400 locations across the country on Wednesday, helped by the government, which gave people the day off and provided transportation.
 
“Tree Day - Plant Your Future” started in 2008, then led by the well-known opera singer, Boris Trajanov. The project picked up in popularity that year when the government of Nikola Gruevski joined in and offered official backing.

“We are happy to join this noble cause,” Skopje mayor Koce Trajanovski said yesterday while planting pine and cypress seedlings at Vodno Mountain, close to the capital. “Our [city] motto is to plant ten new seedlings for each old tree that we cut.”

Prime Minister Gruevski symbolically launched the action on Sunday before he left on a tour of Austria and Germany. President Gjorge Ivanov, who stayed in Macedonia, on Wednesday planted seedlings near the central town of Veles.

Mainly politicians from the ruling parties as well as foreign diplomats also joined in, as did school children, students, athletes, pop stars, actors and police.

Organizers say they have planted a total number of 44 million seedlings since the campaign began in 2008. They estimate that some 100,000 people took part on Wednesday.

But the opposition Social Democrats doubt the success of the action, saying the tree campaign has turned in to a publicity stunt for the VMRO DPMNE-led government.

Igor Ivanovski, a Social Democrat legislator, says he supports ecological campaigns in principle but suspects the numbers of participants and trees planted is blown out of proportion.

“Even if indeed 100,000 people participated in the last action, it takes a lot of effort to plant 4.7 million trees in a couple of hours,” Ivanovski said.

“The entire drive is poorly organized and chaotic, and from what I hear from experts the planting is being done in a fairly incompetent way”, he added, resulting in many seedlings dying or not being planted properly at all.

Horticultural experts note if they are not properly planted and carefully maintained, seedlings die soon after planting.

“The cold temperatures at this time of the year, [now below zero at night] are not particularly worrying but the lack of humidity in the soil might be,” the dean of the Forestry Faculty in Skopje, Aleksandar Trendafilov, said.
 
His said his faculty was actively engaged in giving advice for the action until last year but no one asked had sought their advice this time.

Successful or not, the action has attracted copy-cats in the region. Nearly all of Macedonia's neighbours and countries from the Balkans have started similar campaigns or announced that they will soon do so.

Montenegro, Serbia, Croatia, Bulgaria and Albania have all now organised their own tree-planting drives.