The Protected Landscape Approach - Centre for Mediterranean ...

10. Sustaining rural landscapes and building civil society
themselves. Since 1998 a solar facilities-producing workshop has been operating in the village,
as a part of the “Sun for the White Carpathians” programme developed by SOP Veronica.
Preservation of traditional fruit varieties
Since 1994 Hosttn has been one of the centres of “Traditions of the White Carpathians”, the
initiative involving a variety of partners from throughout the region that is focused on
preserving and using traditional varieties of fruit and supporting traditional extensive fruit
growing through local processing and marketing of fruit products. The project connects fruit
growers, small fruit processors, local governments, and consumers with the aim of reviving
small-scale processing of fruit and preparing a marketing strategy for fruit products so that
profit from sales can support preservation of the cultural landscape.
One of the activities of the group that has combined both cultural and natural heritage
preservation has been the reconstruction in 1998 of one of the last wooden fruit drying kilns in
Hosttn. For hundreds of years the small kilns were ubiquitous, with several in every village
and a total of some 3,000 dotting the White Carpathians as a whole. But the practice of fruit
cultivation and drying has declined over recent decades, and the traditional fruit drying kilns
have fallen into disuse and disrepair. The kiln in Hosttín, which is over 200 years old, was
rebuilt with financial support from the Czech Environmental Partnership Foundation and is
now used by small-scale local producers from Hosttn as well as neighbouring communities to
dry some 4.5 tons of fresh fruit per year.
Juice processing plant
A more ambitious project, undertaken under the banner of the “Traditions of the White
Carpathians”, was the construction of a juice processing plant in Hosttn in 1999/2000. The
small plant produces unfiltered fruit juice from local fruit varieties. In autumn 2000, the plant’s
first season of operation, it purchased and processed 200 tons of apples and produced some
140,000 litres of apple juice. A significant portion of the apples (c.43%) came from orchards
with organic certification. Even in the first difficult year of operation, the plant endeavoured to
pay local producers good prices for their apples. A premium was paid for apples produced with
organic certification in order to motivate small-scale producers to introduce organic production
to their orchards. During the 2001 and 2002 seasons, the production of organic juice grew to
85%, making a net profit of more than US$10,000 in 2002.
The plant, which was built by SOP Veronica with financial and technical support from the
Luxembourg foundation Hëllef fir d’Natur, belongs to the Veronica Foundation and is operated
by the “Traditions of the White Carpathians” Association. The project enjoyed strong support
from the community and its citizens, without which it could not have been realized. The
intention is to diversify production (mixed organic apple juice and red beet juice was intro -
duced to the market in 2002) and to focus on organic certified production.
The juice plant has become a successful and important operation for the village. Its budget is
about 10% of the total income of the local residents (including pensions and state benefits).
Besides its influence on motivating local people to keep and enlarge their orchards as an
important feature of a traditional landscape, it brings one permanent job, part-time employ -
ment, and about eight seasonal jobs between September and November.
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