Over 1,000 hectares of tobacco shredded in half an hour, and no insurance: "They cannot even go in"

Hailstones the size of walnuts. That is a measurement that needs no further explanation among farmers - they know what hail like that does to a tobacco leaf a month before harvest.

Between 1,000 and 1,100 hectares, planted mainly with tobacco but also sunflower, maize and peppers, were destroyed by the storm that hit the Dolneni region in the afternoon. Some estimates from the ground put it at over 1,500 hectares of affected farmland, including the Prilep villages of Malo and Golemo Konjari. The gap between the estimates will be settled by a commission - the gap in the field has already been settled.

"There is tobacco where the damage is 100 percent"

Kire Risteski, president of the Union of Tobacco Associations, called in as soon as he got back from the field.

"The situation is catastrophic. I visited the fields of Debrešte, Ropotovo, Zapolžani, Lažani, Novoselani, and the worst is in Novoselani and Zapolžani. There is tobacco where the damage is 100%, meaning they cannot even go in. The hail has left flooded plots, tobacco flattened," he said.

"They cannot even go in" means there is nothing left to pick. The whole season - the planting, the irrigation, the labour cost, the months of waiting - ends in a leaf nobody will buy.

Most of it is uninsured

And this is the point where the story becomes more than a weather report. For most of the affected farmers, the crop is not insured. That is not the negligence of an individual, but a systemic gap the Union now wants fixed.

"At the first meeting at the Ministry of Agriculture we will now ask for the old law to be brought back - so that when the tobacco contracts themselves are signed, insurance contracts with insurance companies are signed too. That way they would be compensated for part of the loss they suffer," Risteski explains.

So a mechanism once existed that bound the two contracts - the purchase one and the insurance one - into a single signature. That mechanism was abolished. The result shows up every time hail falls.

The rockets are gone, the planes do not go up

Hail protection is the other half of the same problem. The old anti-hail rockets are no longer possible because of the volume of air traffic over our skies. What remains is preventive aerial seeding of hail-bearing clouds - an option introduced a few years ago.

Introduced. The question is how many times it has been used this season, and who decides when a plane goes up. A mechanism that exists on paper and does not activate when a hail cloud forms over a tobacco region is, in practice, the same as no mechanism at all.

Commission, report, government

Prilep mayor Dejan Prodanoski was on the ground in Golemo Konjari and announced the formation of a damage assessment commission. The report will go to the government, which has the authority to act. The Union is advising all affected farmers to report their losses to their municipalities.

The procedure is familiar and will unwind exactly as it has before. Commission, report, waiting. But the Union itself says the best measure for the future is insurance, "because there is no other mechanism for protection from severe, destructive storms".

That is a sentence worth holding onto. The people who just lost an entire year are saying there is no mechanism to protect them. Compensation via commission arrives after the damage is done and covers a fraction. Insurance tied to the purchase contract would be a system. It used to be the legal solution, and then it stopped being one.