Valencia (EFE).- Professional agricultural organizations and entities related to the beekeeping sector of the Valencian Community have gathered this Thursday before Les Corts Valencianes to denounce that their profession is “in danger of extinction” due to the lack of state and regional aid .
Dressed in protective suits with which they have simulated smoking a beehive and even bathing themselves from head to toe in honey, dozens of farmers have denounced the “insensitivity” of an Administration that, in their opinion, “looks the other way.”
The concentration has been called by the Asociación Provincial Apícola de Castellón (APAC), Asaja Alicante, La Unió Llauradora i Ramadera, ApiADS Comunitat Valenciana and the beekeeping sector of AVA-Asaja.
«Without bees you cannot live»
“We are here because all these gentlemen are the ones who truly maintain biodiversity, wild and agricultural flora,” said beekeeper Vicente Játiva, who has assured that “without bees, we know scientifically that you cannot live.”
Játiva has lamented the lack of subsidies, for example “for transport” or aid for “such long pernicious droughts” and added: “You have to help apiaries to eat.”
To this is added the comparative grievance with “other provinces of Spain”, as denounced by the “third generation” beekeeper Sergio Fernández, who has criticized that “to a certain extent”, in the Community the sector is treated as “criminals”. .
“They have set us aside, they do not give us any help, they have even excluded us from the bonus for the price of fuel and we are transhumants,” he censured, and has compared this situation with “other communities that pay 17 or 20 euros per hive Just to keep them alive.”
Fernández, who combines beekeeping with other work in order to obtain sufficient income, has regretted not being able to dedicate himself “100%” to what he likes, and has said that the current conditions make it “difficult”.
This has also been expressed by the AVA-Asaja Alicante beekeeping technician Inma Segura, who has denounced that the profession is “in total extinction” and, increasingly, “dead bees”.
empty hives
“Soon there will be coffins, which are empty hives, in the fields, there will no longer be bees inside the hives,” he lamented, and this, he said, because Valencia is “the only autonomous community in which the Administration turns its back” on the sector.
The low production responds, according to the general secretary of La Unió Llauradora i Ramadera, Carles Peris, to aspects such as climate change or the impossibility of settling in citrus-growing areas where “very likely good populations could be had.”
“In addition, in the Valencian Community we are clearly affected by imports of honey with standards much lower than ours from countries like China or Argentina,” he concluded. EFE
