The processing of the PP and Vox bill that expands irrigation in the area of Doñana has started this Tuesday in the Parliament of Andalusia with the appearances of social agents, cooperatives, environmentalists, mayors, farmers and irrigators. The last voice to be heard, 10 hours after the start of the commission, has been that of the president of the Doñana Participation Council, the biologist Miguel Delibes de Castro, initially vetoed by the PP, although this party later rectified it.
“Have courage and withdraw the initiative to expand irrigation,” the former director of the Doñana Biological Station has requested before the parliamentary commission. In the same way, he has asked the opposition not to take advantage of the situation to bring the ember to his sardine if that situation occurred.
Like all those appearing, Delibes de Castro has asked the central government and the Junta to sit at a table and negotiate. “They can fatten this absurd war or offer a peace seeking consensus. I ask you to choose peace.” The biologist has acknowledged that in his previous appearance a year ago he came irritated, but now his “anger level is already saturated”. Delibes de Castro has not changed his opposition to the proposal because he considers it “inadequate” and stressed that the controversy “has gone too far.” “It has led to the greatest institutional, political and media crisis. Let’s stop the tension. It is not only the conservation of Doñana, but social peace”.
The president of the Participation Council has not described the bill as a deception, but almost: “The essence of the proposal is to declare irrigable areas without water. It is like offering Sevillian and Huelva drivers to travel between Huelva and Seville by AVE. The drivers would like to, but it’s a joke. I think they are distracting us with a trick: will irrigable areas without water continue to pump, convert criminal offenses into administrative ones? We have the right to be informed as citizens.”
Regardless of the positions for or against the controversial initiative, which has been rejected by the European Commission, UNESCO, the central government and the scientific community, the majority of those appearing demanded that the central and Andalusian Executives to dialogue, seek a solution and remove from the electoral agenda an issue that is putting the powerful strawberry sector in the province of Huelva in a bind. The approval of the law by urgent procedure is scheduled for the end of July or September, after the general elections. The president of the Board, Juan Manuel Moreno, has reiterated that he is willing to modify the law if there is a “credible and viable” alternative. The PSOE, for its part, insists that no negotiation path is open.
Parliament has dispatched the mandatory hearing process in a single day. In that list, representatives of the scientific community critical of the project have been left out, such as the director of the Doñana Biological Station, Eloy Revilla. Also Robert Casier, representative of Unesco; the ecologists of SEOBirdLife or the association of farmers Puerta Doñana and the irrigators of Almonte, a municipality in which 50% of the irrigated lands of the Condado de Huelva are located.
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The people cited have had 10 minutes to make their presentation. Each of the five parliamentary groups have been able to ask questions for two minutes. The session has started with anger, because the president of the commission, Ana Chocano (PP), has made ugly the socialist rapporteur of the law, Mario Jiménez, the way to ask his questions. Some 200 people have demonstrated at the gates of the Andalusian Chamber against the proposal.
The PP and Vox bill aims to expand the irrigable agricultural areas in the Condado de Huelva region, whose owners were left out of regulation when in 2014, by decree, the so-called strawberry plan, the Special Plan for Huelva County Irrigation Management that affects five municipalities (Almonte, Bonares, Lucena del Puerto, Moguer and Rociana del Condado). The initiative does not clarify how many hectares this expansion of irrigation will affect, but, in a letter sent to the European Commission in February 2022, the Junta de Andalucía detailed that these would amount to 748.62. The PP says that these crops will be irrigated with surface water from the transfer of the Tinto, Odiel and Piedras rivers, not with water from the Doñana aquifer, which is “overexploited.” This transfer, of almost 20 cubic hectometres, is already committed, but for areas with water rights. And the transfer works have not been executed.
Twenty appearances
Before Delibes, there have been about twenty appearances. The five mayors of the County (three of them are no longer so since May 28) have called for dialogue and consensus between the central government and the Board in unison. “The hornet’s nest has been kicked which has made all the wasps jump and sting us. This is not a good thing. Consensus and dialogue are necessary. The image we are giving is one of shame. The media hype is harming us”, said the mayor of Bonares, Juan Antonio García (PSOE). Only the outgoing mayor of Lucena, Manuel Mora, has given his resounding support to the bill, a position shared by the PP mayor-elect. The still mayoress of Almonte, Rocío Castellano, has said that the proposal “is unsustainable, because there is no water.”
The president of the Association of Irrigation Communities of Huelva, Juan Antonio Millán, has spoken out against this position, saying: “When it is said that there is no water in Huelva, it is a lie. Deliberately lying. Droughts are cyclical. It is false that Doñana is dying”.
The representatives of the COAG and the Workers’ Commissions have requested the suspension of the processing of the bill and have demanded that a dialogue table be set up between Administrations. “First you have to consolidate the existing irrigation, recover the aquifer and when the water works are finished, study new irrigation in the area. The war between administrations will only bring false expectations to farmers and no solution for the sector or for the park”, said Eduardo López, from COAG. This organization has provided the following data: 2.5% of the owners are large farms dominated by investment funds that monopolize 60% of the area of red fruits and 80% of the volume of water.
The representative of CC OO, Emilio Fernández, has warned that the legislative initiative “puts the excellence of the Huelva strawberry brand at risk”, has highlighted that 70% of the employment generated by the sector is employed by others and has asked to “retake the political agreement and get the sector out of this absurd political battle.” He has also demanded that the central and regional governments execute the planned infrastructures, without which the transfer is not possible.
The representative of Freshueva, the sector’s employers’ association, has referred to the reputation of red fruits. “The reputational campaign has an economic component. In Germany there are platforms that attack strawberries, sometimes products from Turkey and others from Greece”.
WWF environmentalists have called for the withdrawal of the bill. Its spokesman, Juanjo Carmona, has argued that with this initiative “they want to do a favor to those who are irrigating illegally” and has stressed that the proposal will revalue some land that is now dry by qualifying it as irrigable. A dry hectare is valued at about 10,000 euros, while if it is strawberry its price amounts to 80,000 euros.
The representative of the Agri-food Cooperatives of Andalusia, Jaime Martínez Conradi, has opted for the bill because “it does not imply the granting of any automatic right to irrigation. It is necessary to give legal certainty to lands that are now in limbo. We regret that a distorted message is being transmitted that criminalizes the red fruit sector”. He has also called for “taking the strawberry off the electoral agenda, because it is an opportunistic confrontation” and has criticized the “disastrous water management.”
All those involved have recognized that the so-called 2014 Strawberry plan caused “unfair” situations. There were farmers whose lands were left out of the regulation and are now claiming “historical rights” so that their lands can be classified as irrigable. In this sense, Ana Warleta González has had an impact. head of the Regional Planning Office of the Junta in Huelva, who has highlighted the “errors” of the cartographic system that was used in its day and that was used to give or not water to agricultural areas. Two farmers, father and son, cited by the PP, have told their “personal story” and have given voice to those “injustices” that some farmers complain about.
A retired official from the Guadalquivir Hydrographic Confederation (CHG), Juan Saura, has insisted on the need for the Government and the Board to go hand in hand. “This requires a State policy beyond whether 800 hectares want to be incorporated or not when there is a problem in Doñana. It is always necessary to start from a consensus of the Government of the nation and the Junta”.
The commission was not attended by the president of the CHG, Joaquín Páez, who preferred to send a report. It is a devastating document in which it is argued that the proposed law is outside the hydrological plan, European legality and the commitments with Unesco. “Declaring some areas as irrigable when they will not have access to water is, at least, useless, and more precisely, a hoax”, he maintains.
Nor has the Minister of Ecological Transition, Teresa Ribera, cited by PP and Vox, attended the commission.
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