The collective warns that some companies let crops die due to market conditions
The Platform Salvemos el Arabí y Comarca has denounced a “massive abandonment of lettuce” in the Altiplano on two farms: in the area of Carche, in the municipality of Jumilla, and also in the area of El Llano, in Yecla.
There are tens of thousands of lettuces that are waiting to rot on the farms with what is supposed to be “wasted millions and millions of liters of water” that are extracted from the Jumilla-Villena aquifer. An underground lake that “is declared overexploited” and they warn that this practice is not new, but that in recent years they have been observing cases of abandonment of lettuce, melons, watermelons, broccoli, cauliflower, courgette…
This group continues to denounce this policy of letting crops die, which is fundamentally due to market conditions. It is not economically profitable for the companies to collect the products, due to an excessive offer in the markets or to the prices that are paid for the products at the moment.
Lettuce wasted on a farm in Carche, in Jumilla. /
The large crop companies in the Region of Murcia have been settling in the Altiplano in recent years. According to data from the platform, in the region there are already some 3,000 hectares of intensive irrigation, an area that continues to increase year after year, with some 120 more hectares so far in 2022.
“We fear that more companies may continue to arrive due to the critical and unfortunate situation in which the Mar Menor finds itself, fleeing from new restrictions in the Campo de Cartagena,” warned Alejandro Ortuño, spokesman for the group. “The point is that these companies are transferring the same problems that they have generated in the Mar Menor environment, with the additional aggravation that they may exhaust all the underground water resources that we have.”
This citizen group denounces that agricultural companies receive large amounts of public money for the entire irrigation infrastructure, including large irrigation ponds that have proliferated, “and in exchange they intensify irrigation in the Altiplano and deplete the aquifers,” says Ortuño, who also indicates that, normally, the majority of producers who have access to these European funds, called “operational funds”, are in practice large companies organized as OPFH (Organisation of Fruit and Vegetable Producers), a legal figure used by large conglomerates of business groups and investors to be able to access these grants.
#Lets #save #Arabí #denounces #abandonment #thousands #lettuces #Altiplano