Almost two years and three elections later, it seems that the thaw in the war between the Andalusian Junta (PP) and the Government on account of Doñana arrives. This Tuesday both Administrations have sealed the beginning of a peace after a continuous crossing of reproaches since in January 2022 the Andalusian right and the ultra-right presented their first bill to expand irrigation in the Doñana environment. The rule, which had against the European Commission, UNESCO, the scientific community and environmentalists, remains in the air for now.
This Tuesday, everything was smiles between the Andalusian president, Juan Manuel Moreno (PP), and the vice president and acting minister for the Ecological Transition, Teresa Ribera, when they announced that the regional rule is suspended. The reversal 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. 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 adjoining region, which lives on intensive strawberry crops.
Board and Government are given a month to specify what those 350 million will be spent on, after creating a working group from both Administrations, which they intend to open to municipalities and social agents in the area, farmers and ecologists.
"Today we open a new stage of dialogue. Our commitment is to comply with Doñana and offer security and progress. The residents of Doñana look at us, the Spaniards and observe us from the outside," said Ribera, referring to the warnings of the European Commission and Unesco. If Brussels threatened Spain with millionaire fines if it did not withdraw the Andalusian law for failing to comply with the judgment of the Court of Justice of the EU, the Paris-based institution warned in September that it would qualify Doñana as World Heritage in Danger if it did not adopt urgent measures.
The agreement has come in extremis and in the middle of a hard battle between Alberto Núñez Feijóo and Pedro Sánchez for the investiture, just one day before the inclusion of the law in the agenda of the plenary session on the 10th for its final approval in the Andalusian Parliament. Moreno has been satisfied with the agreement: "It will be a sensible dialogue and both teams will pull 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 and social development of the region. "
Moreno advanced this Tuesday morning the agreement to the farmers who would have benefited from the law now suspended to lack irrigation rights, and they received it "expectantly", waiting for the fate of the economic investment plan to be specified, according to sources of the Board.
Both Moreno and Ribera have taken it for granted 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 back into 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-wing'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. Frozen the proposal of law of the PP and Vox, Moreno has promised to promote the measures of the 2014 plan, which for nine years the Board has developed at a snail's pace. "We have to comply with that law 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 get ahead in Doñana by closing the sanction procedure in the European Commission still open, "he said, referring 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 of the Andalusian Executive and Minister of the Environment, Ramón Fernández-Pacheco, highlighted the "change of opinion" of Ribera to meet with Moreno in San Telmo, headquarters of the presidency of the Board, when the law of expansion of irrigation "is still alive and in process". The position of the third vice-president until now was that the law should first be withdrawn and then sit down to talk. This position was not entirely shared in the Andalusian PSOE, whose general secretary, Juan Espadas, has 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 the far right registered it alone and dragged the popular to join. Although it was requested to be processed through the urgent procedure, which reduces the deadlines by half, the proposed law has suffered several intentional delays. In the previous legislature, it declined due to the electoral advance. In the current one, the initiative was twice put in the freezer by the municipal elections and then by the general elections.
The last delay occurred on September 20. The law was already with all the procedures finalized ready for inclusion in the order of the plenary session a week ago. The spokesman of 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 for the next session on October 10 and 11. Martín explained this sudden change of opinion in the "barrage of criticism" he had received for coinciding the final approval with the first vote of the failed investiture of Alberto Núñez Feijóo. "We thus guarantee our own, clean and transparent debate," he argued. He also denied changes to the text. "There is no intention to change" or a comma, he said.
The proposal of law of the PP and Vox intended to expand the irrigable agricultural areas in the region of the County of Huelva, whose owners were 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 was approved and agreed that affects five municipalities (Almonte, Bonares, Lucena del Puerto, Moguer and Rociana del Condado). The so-called strawberry plan regularized some 9,400 hectares of a total of 11,000 in one cut. The farmers who were left out allege that the cartography used for regularization was riddled with "errors", so they claim supposed "historical rights" that no law collects.
The initiative did not clarify how many hectares this irrigation expansion would affect (it does refer to 1,500 farmers) 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 compromised, but for areas with water rights to prevent them from taking water from the aquifer. And the works of the transfer are not executed.
Although they do not have water, the change of land use from rainfed to irrigable agricultural has a first effect: to increase its value in the market. According to WWF data, a hectare of rainfed land is valued at about 10,000 euros, while if it is strawberry its price amounts to 80,000 euros.
Last June, during the hearing process of the proposed law, which has the rejection of the European Commission, UNESCO, the central government and the scientific community, the majority of the twenty participants demanded that the central and Andalusian Executives dialogue and seek a solution to an issue that is putting the powerful strawberry sector of the province of Huelva in a bind. Among the voices that were heard, the president of the Doñana Participation Council, biologist Miguel Delibes de Castro, thundered: "They can fatten this absurd war or offer peace by seeking consensus. I ask you to choose peace. Have courage and withdraw the irrigation expansion initiative," he said then.
The scientist, who directed the Doñana Biological Station, slipped that the proposal was a hoax: "The essence of the proposal is to declare irrigable areas without water. It's like offering Sevillian and Huelva drivers to travel between Huelva and Seville by AVE. Drivers would like to, but it's a joke. I think they distract us with a trick: will irrigable areas without water be to continue pumping, to turn criminal offenses into administrative ones? We have the right to be informed as citizens."
Meanwhile, the ecological outlook for Doñana is black, with wetlands under minimum, as well as the Andalusian marshes, some of them at less than 20% of their capacity.
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