The president of the Association of Food Industries of Murcia, Alicante and Albacete (AGRUPAL) José García, presented the new general secretary, César Nicolás, to the employers’ Board of Directors, who obtained the unanimous support of the association. García valued the figure of the recently incorporated general secretary, highlighting “his professional value and his human quality to face the important challenges that lie ahead for the food industry.”
Among these challenges is hydrological planning, which “can very negatively affect the availability and cost of water borne directly by our companies and their suppliers, which will necessarily translate into loss of jobs, less competitiveness, higher costs of food for consumers, and, in general, a deterioration of the sector and less water and food security for society as a whole”.
In line with his intervention at the meeting of the Board of Directors, he reported that various initiatives have already been announced to appeal this hydrological planning to the courts and, although he said he did not know the route and the final result of this process, from this employers’ association he announced that “they will support As many initiatives contribute to favoring the food industry and its permanent improvement, objectives to which this approved planning does not seem to contribute.
For García Gómez, “at Agrupal we are especially sensitive to this problem since we are a business group interested, specifically, in the sector of the industrialization of agricultural products”. “We know that we need desalinated water, but without ceasing to consider other alternatives with less economic and environmental impact,” he added.
call to dialogue
The president of Agrupal called for dialogue between the competent authorities and the need for stable and peaceful agreements that respect environmental preservation and the legitimate interests of all parties. “Reasonable balance points must be found that do not harm key economic sectors such as food, of prime importance and necessity for all, and even more so in situations like the current ones, with rising production costs, food prices at the rise, and numerous uncertainties for the future that we must, together and responsibly, try to minimize.
García Gómez recalled that this water problem comes from the recent publication in the BOE of Royal Decree 35/2023, of January 24, which approves the revision of the hydrological plans of the Spanish hydrographic demarcations. Among these plans is that of the Tagus demarcation, whose link with the Segura basin and the Spanish southeast is evident through the Tagus-Segura transfer.
This Tagus plan contains determinations on that basin that are its own and on which there is no objection from other territorial areas, but there is a specific one that has a direct impact on the Segura basin, and that is the fixing of ecological flows. For these flows, higher values were set in the Tagus axis (Aranjuez, Toledo, Talavera, etc.) than the current ones and that seriously compromise the availability of transferable resources to the Segura, in very significant quantities. Fulfillment of these prescriptions will undoubtedly mean a substantial reduction in transfer, which the Ministry does not deny and which it proposes to replace by increasing the production of desalinated water.
Professional career of César Nicolás
Cesar Nicolás is an industrial technical engineer from the UPCT, an MBA from ENAE and a Master’s Degree in Engineering of Integrated Quality, Safety and Environment Systems from UCAM. He has more than 20 years of experience managing business units in companies in the industrial and innovation sectors in the Region of Murcia. In the field of associationism, he is Dean of the College of the Official College of Industrial Technical Engineers, vice president of the Spanish Union of Associations of Industrial Technical Engineers and member of the General Council of Colleges of Industrial Technical Engineering in Spain.
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