Almost two years and three elections later, it seems that the thaw is coming in the war between the Andalusian Junta (PP) and the Government on behalf of Doñana. This Tuesday, both Administrations have sealed the beginning of peace after a continuous exchange of reproaches since in January 2022 the Andalusian right and extreme right presented their first bill to expand irrigation in the area of Doñana. The norm, which had the European Commission, UNESCO, the scientific community and environmentalists against it, remains up in the air for the moment.
This Tuesday, it was all smiles between the Andalusian president, Juan Manuel Moreno (PP), and the acting vice president and minister for the Ecological Transition, Teresa Ribera, when they announced that the regional rule is suspended. The retreat comes after the Government announced a plan of 350 million for social projects in the region of El Condado de Huelva, where the lands that the new law intended to convert from rainfed to irrigated are located. The investment is added to the environmental shock plan announced by the Government a year ago, endowed with 356 million, with which the Executive mobilizes a total of about 700 million for the park and the adjacent region, which lives off intensive strawberry cultivation. .
The Board and Government are given one month to specify how those 350 million will be spent, after creating a working group from both Administrations, which they intend to open to the city councils and social agents in the area, farmers and environmentalists.
“Today we open a new stage of dialogue. Our commitment is to comply with Doñana and offer security and progress. The residents of Doñana, the Spaniards, and they observe us from the outside are watching us,” said Ribera, alluding to the warnings from the European Commission and UNESCO. If Brussels threatened Spain with million-dollar fines if it did not withdraw the Andalusian law for failing to comply with the ruling of the EU Court of Justice, the Paris-based institution warned in September that it would classify Doñana as World Heritage in Danger if it did not. adopted urgent measures.
The agreement has been reached in extremis and in the middle of a tough battle between Alberto Núñez Feijóo and Pedro Sánchez for the investiture, just one day before the inclusion of the law on the agenda of the plenary session on the 10th for its final approval in the Andalusian Parliament. Moreno has expressed satisfaction with the agreement: “It will be a sensible dialogue and both teams will use audacity, capacity, complicity and generosity to find complex solutions that help improve the environment of Doñana, with a fine balance between environmental protection and economic development and social of the region.”
This Tuesday morning, Moreno advanced the agreement to the farmers who would have benefited from the now suspended law as they lacked irrigation rights, and they received it “expectantly”, waiting for the fate of the economic investment plan to be finalized. , according to sources from the Board.
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Both Moreno and Ribera have assumed that their negotiating teams will find an agreement at the end of October to define the appropriate destination of the social plan, whose amount of 350 million is similar to that announced by the Government a year ago for environmental measures in Doñana. This first plan was intended to ensure that surface water flows again in the reserve with the fluidity of decades ago and to buy legal irrigated farms and alleviate the critical situation of the aquifer, declared overexploited two years ago.
The Andalusian right’s plan to increase some 750 hectares sought to repeal the current 2014 plan, designed for the national park to recover from the plundering of water by farmers without permits. With the PP and Vox bill frozen, Moreno has committed to promoting the measures of the 2014 plan, which for nine years the Board has developed at a snail’s pace. “We have to comply with this legal agreement,” admitted the Andalusian president.
Just before the meeting, Ribera declared: “I trust that the meeting will go well and we will be able to join forces, we do not need to go to any court to tell us that the Administrations must work to move forward in Doñana by closing the sanction procedure in the European Commission still open,” he said, alluding to the Government’s threat to take the law to the Constitutional Court.
The Board did not confirm the meeting until three hours before the meeting, which the central government reported on Monday night. The spokesman for the Andalusian Executive and Minister of the Environment, Ramón Fernández-Pacheco, highlighted Ribera’s “change of opinion” to meet with Moreno in San Telmo, headquarters of the presidency of the Board, when the irrigation expansion law “continues.” alive and in process.” The third vice president’s position until now was that she should first withdraw the law and then sit down to talk. This position was not entirely shared by the Andalusian PSOE, whose general secretary, Juan Espadas, mediated so that the photo of Ribera and Moreno could materialize this Tuesday.
PP and Vox
The controversial initiative, presented jointly by the parliamentary groups of the PP and Vox, entered Parliament on March 3, although before that the extreme right registered it alone and dragged the popular ones to join it. Although it was requested to be processed urgently, which reduces the deadlines by half, the bill has suffered several intentional delays. In the previous legislature, it declined due to early elections. Currently, the initiative was put in the freezer twice for the municipal elections and then for the general elections.
The last delay occurred on September 20. The law was already with all the procedures completed, ready for its inclusion in the order of the plenary session a week ago. The spokesperson for the popular group, Toni Martín, announced as a scoop in an interview on Canal Sur that it would be debated on the 27th, but 48 hours later he rectified and postponed it to the next session on October 10 and 11. Martín explained this sudden change of opinion in the “flurry of criticism” that he had received for coinciding the final approval with the first vote of the failed investiture of Alberto Núñez Feijóo. “We thus guarantee a proper, clean and transparent debate,” he argued. He also denied modifications to the text. “There is no intention to change” even one comma, he said.
The PP and Vox bill sought to expand the irrigable agricultural areas in the Condado de Huelva region, whose owners were left out of regulation when in 2014, with a socialist government and via decree, the Special Plan for the Management of Irrigation of the County of Huelva that affects five municipalities (Almonte, Bonares, Lucena del Puerto, Moguer and Rociana del Condado). The so-called strawberry plan regularized some 9,400 hectares out of a total of 11,000 in one fell swoop. The farmers who were left out allege that the cartography used for regularization was riddled with “errors,” which is why they claim supposed “historical rights” that are not included in any law.
The initiative did not clarify how many hectares this expansion of irrigation would affect (it does refer to 1,500 farmers) but, in a letter sent to the European Commission in February 2022, the Andalusian Government 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 hectometers, is already committed, but for areas with water rights to prevent them from taking water from the aquifer. And the transfer works have not been carried out.
Although they do not have water, the change in land use from rainfed to irrigated agriculture has a first effect: increasing its value in the market. According to WWF data, a hectare of dryland is valued at around 10,000 euros, while if it is strawberry its price rises to 80,000 euros.
Last June, during the hearing process of the bill, which has been rejected by the European Commission, UNESCO, the central government and the scientific community, the majority of the twenty people appearing demanded that the central executives and Andalusian to dialogue and seek a solution to an issue that is putting the powerful strawberry sector in the province of Huelva in a difficult situation. Among the voices heard, above all, that of the president of the Doñana Participation Council, the biologist Miguel Delibes de Castro, thundered: “They can add weight to this absurd war or offer peace seeking consensus. I ask you to choose peace. Have courage and withdraw the initiative to expand irrigation,” he said then.
The scientist, who directed the Doñana Biological Station, stated that the proposal was a hoax: “The essence of the proposal is to declare irrigable areas without water. It is like offering drivers from Seville and Huelva to travel between Huelva and Seville by AVE. The drivers would like it, but it’s a joke. I think they are distracting us with a trick: will irrigation areas without water mean continuing to pump, converting criminal infractions into administrative ones? We have the right to be informed as citizens.”
Meanwhile, the ecological outlook for Doñana is dark, with the wetlands at minimum levels, as well as the Andalusian swamps, some of them at less than 20% of their capacity.
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