After a year, return to the starting box.

With the Doñana park in the same critical state of biodiversity, the threats from the European Commission to fine Spain, the scientific reports against it, the complaints from ecologists and the farmers themselves in the area, the notices of the European supermarket chains that would reduce exports, and the warning from the Government that it would go to the Constitutional Court for invasion of powers.

The Andalusian right has resumed its bill to increase irrigation along with Doñana –with small changes– and this Friday it has reactivated the criticism of environmentalists, scientists and the Ministry for Ecological Transition.

Three months before the municipal elections, the Andalusian PP of Juan Manuel Moreno – who insists on his strong ecological conscience – has presented this Friday together with the extreme right a law to increase the strawberry greenhouses next to the emblematic reserve.

And the reaction against it has been severe: “The drums of war against Doñana and legality return.

Let there be no doubt: we will oppose any attack on this valuable natural space”, the Vice President and Minister for the Ecological Transition, Teresa Ribera, has censured on Twitter.

The ministry does not rule out denouncing the law before the Constitutional Court for invasion of powers, as it warned a year ago, and recalls that Brussels already warned that by leaving the wetland unprotected, the Court of Justice of the EU was disobeyed.

"The bill is an outrage (...) Increasing irrigation in these areas, close to the Doñana National Park, would further damage an area already seriously affected by drought," criticizes the Government.

The language of war augurs another crude confrontation between the central and Andalusian governments, while science and the European Commission warn of the damage to an already badly damaged reserve, with the same background scenario: a few months from the polls — now municipal, one year autonomous—, the right has prioritized the electoral benefit of having some 1,500 Huelva farmers who today irrigate with illegal wells and whose farms will become irrigable, over the criticism they will receive for the damage to the environment.

The Andalusian spokesman for the PP parliamentary group, Toni Martín, this Friday.

Maria Jose Lopez (Europa Press)

The possible invasion of powers is based on the fact that the Board intends by law to guarantee that strawberry farmers, who will have their land classified as irrigable, have water, despite the fact that the body that decides on water rights is the ministry.

Justice has already ruled on some thirty sentences to clarify that precisely the previous plan of 2004 that would now be knocked down did not invade powers by having the opinion of the ministry's water technicians, who are now ignored.

The PP proclaims that its proposal “speaks neither of Doñana nor of water, only of territorial planning”.

“Doñana is untouchable”, he says, and assures that the water resources will not come from the aquifer that nourishes the National Park, but from surface waters.

This requires a series of works that are the responsibility of the Board and also the State.

"If there is a change of government after the December elections, they will speed up," predicted the president of the PP of Huelva, expressly acknowledging the electoral interest of the proposal.

He also admitted that "as long as there is no surface water, nothing will be solved."

For ecologists, the law leaves Doñana unprotected, thirsty in the middle of winter: “The procedure to modify the 2004 plan [of the forest crown, called the strawberry plan] and lower the sectoral reports is pure cowardice because they would be negative.

It is unheard of to make a singular law for this”, criticizes Juan José Carmona, coordinator of the WWF for Doñana.

Also against the plan is Eloy Revilla, director of the Doñana Biological Station (CSIC), which represents scientific knowledge about the reserve and its current precarious evolution.

“Legalizing some uses of water that are illegal creates a big problem that will only increase the complexity.

It is a deception to the farmers themselves, they are talking about a water resource that does not exist”.

The question is how the information on water availability will reach farmers in the area.

Why is the chosen formula relevant?

The key is that the bill replaces an action to regulate a specific territory that the Andalusian Board has always exercised through an administrative procedure.

Through Parliament, the popular and Vox avoid all the experts who would warn of the difficulty of justifying an alteration of the soil in an area as stressed and mapped as the Doñana environment, where each hectare has a classification and a color on the map .

And above all, the popular ones, who govern with an absolute majority, elude the cascade of reports from the Junta and others: the Doñana Participation Council, the opinions of the ministry and the area councils, their own environmental evaluation study, reports from other ministries affected, the period of allegations that farmers in the area affected by the new water rights may present… In addition, the law is being processed urgently and may be approved before August.

The president of the Junta de Andalucía, Juan Manuel Moreno, this Thursday in Doñana.

Julio Munoz (EFE)

The right defends that the current plan is different from that of 2022 because it would no longer give groundwater to farmers who are illegal today with non-irrigable soil, but rather it would be superficial and would respect the overexploited aquifer.

The law will convert the new farms into “preferred” land and farmers who are currently illegal could have priority over others with water rights, but with the tap now cut off due to drought.

"The rest of us, this kills us," laments one of them who requests anonymity.

PP and Vox present the text without cartography to avoid indicating in advance which farms the measure would benefit and have eliminated the number of hectares that could benefit, as in the proposal registered in the last legislature, but they admit that they are around 1,600 hectares, according to affirmed the parliamentary spokesman of the PP, Toni Martín, and the president of the PP of Huelva and deputy, Manuel Andrés González.

The proposal has included the creation of a technical office that will review "case by case" whether the land can be considered irrigable.

If they get the go-ahead, "they will be able to claim" water from the Guadalquivir Hydrographic Confederation, over which the Board has no jurisdiction.

Sources from the Ministry of Sustainability, Environment and Blue Economy acknowledge that it is "a political issue".

The Guadalquivir Hydrographic Confederation, dependent on the Ecological Transition, often repeats that there is no more water to distribute, a reality that is reflected in its Hydrological Plan that covers until 2028, and that rejects the possibility that more farmers knock on its door looking for of water for intensively irrigated crops.

The technical office is one of the demands of the PSOE that the popular have incorporated into the text, although the Socialists deny that they have agreed to anything with the PP.

Nor does the Ministry for Ecological Transition feel involved with the proposal.

The two meetings that Minister Fernández-Pacheco held with the Secretary of State for the Environment, Hugo Morán, ended without an agreement after the latter unsuccessfully requested his withdrawal.

The Doñana marsh, last November.

/ PACO BRIDGES

The popular ones assure that they have included the claim of the ministry on the forestry law.

"We have done a cut and paste," says González.

The Board also held a meeting in Brussels with the Director of Biodiversity, Humberto Delgado, on February 8, which was attended by the Deputy Minister, Sergio Arjona, and the General Director of Protected Natural Areas, José Enrique Borrallo.

The PSOE, in a statement, reproached the president of the Junta, Juan Manuel Moreno, for "going back to hide behind his parliamentary group and not assuming responsibility" for irrigation in Doñana.

The Socialists claim that it is the regional government that presents a bill that requires a series of mandatory reports and the favorable opinion of the Doñana Participation Council where all the affected sectors are present.

They also ask for "the creation of a bilateral commission or technical table with the Government of Spain, which also has powers in the water issue, which is the key."

Faced with this repeated panorama, the response of the European Commission remains to be seen, which a year ago already warned Spain of new fines for violating the ruling of the Court of Justice of the EU, which had required it to protect Doñana so that biodiversity could recover and saw that the direction of Andalusia was the opposite.

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