Foment del Treball and the Institut Agrícola call for Catalonia to become the agri-food hub of southern Europe

Foment del Treball and the Institut Agrícola Català de Sant Isidre have proposed this Monday a change of orientation of the European, Spanish and Catalan policy with respect to the agri-food sector, with the aim of guaranteeing the food supply, turning Catalonia into one of the agri-food hubs most important in southern Europe.

According to both business organizations, in the post-Covid world, agri-food productive sovereignty is more important than ever, and even more so with the tensions that businessmen and consumers are experiencing with supply chain interruptions, serious inflation problems that are they can become persistent and hardly reversible losses of competitiveness “that take us down from the path of convergence with the great global economies”.

This situation has been aggravated ostensibly by the war in Ukraine, which may call into question the guarantee of supply for the European Union, a population of 500 million inhabitants. Added to this situation is the need to design effective policies with which the objectives renewed at COP26 can be met, where the agri-food sector must make more efficient use of all resources, an issue that is now once again more relevant when It depends heavily on resources from abroad that are now threatened by the Russia-Ukraine conflict, what could happen with China and the role of other territories that should become secure sources of supply (Latin America).

Among the measures proposed, Foment and the Institut are in favor of favoring a stable legislative regime in the field of water and urge the Generalitat to establish a “single” and stable regulatory framework and that allows the economic sustainability of the important infrastructures that we are going to need to face this important challenge in the coming years, favoring modern facilities that favor the Integral Water Cycle, taking advantage of every last drop, favoring sustainable development and generating clean energy .

They also demand that the Generalitat and the Government of Spain include this project in the demands for European funds to convert a degraded and impoverished area into a large agricultural production area that guarantees the supply of basic products because we need a larger agricultural area to be able to produce intensively, efficiently and sustainably.

No more ZEPA zones

The Urgell Canal would make a total of 87,000 hectares fertile in the Pla d’Urgell, Urgell, La Noguera, Segrià and Garrigues counties. In short, create an agri-food hub that will guarantee food security in Catalonia and will be an important support in the productive capacity of Spain.

Foment del Treball and the Institut Agrícola Català de Sant Isidre demand that the Generalitat not extend the Baix Llobregat special protection area for birds (ZEPA) because the improvement of the environment does not go through the deterioration of the local agri-food industry.

The president of the Institut Agrícola Català de Sant Isidre, Baldiri Ros, has stressed in a press conference that more hectares of natural protection are not needed, but rather actively manage the existing ones, since the lack of management and investment plans in the ZEPA current has caused an abandonment and loss of biodiversity that will not be solved by multiplying the protected territory.

Likewise, Ros calculates that 20% of the farmland in Catalonia is abandoned and could be recovered for agriculture. He has added that, in order to respond to short-term needs if Ukraine cannot sow because of the war, it should propose that the plots that the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) requires to leave fallow can be activated in the EU.