Huelva, (EFE) expand the adjustable surface of the area by 20%.
At a press conference in Huelva, the person in charge of WWF Spain’s Water and Agriculture Projects, Felipe Fuentelsaz, and the WWF Spain coordinator for Doñana, Juanjo Carmona, explained that to obtain this figure, the surface data in irrigation in the area between 2004 and 2014 with what is included in the proposed Law.
Carmona has said that the figure for hectares that could be regularized is “much more than double the hectares that their promoters talk about” and has specified that contrary to what the Junta de Andalucía argues, the WWF investigation shows that “the Illegal farms that would benefit from the amnesty were irrigated after the approval in 2004 of the Doñana Area Land Management Plan (POTAD), that is, with full knowledge that they were illegal in terms of land management and that they had no legal right to water.”
The Strawberry Plan Modification
He explained that this area of 1,903.7 hectares, many of which are illegally irrigated outside the irrigable agricultural area of the 2013 Special Plan for Irrigation Management of the North Crown of Doñana, come from two types of soil: agricultural rainfed and forestry; in both cases, illegally transformed between 2004 and 2014.
Carmona has added, with the modification of the Strawberry Plan proposed by PP and Vox, 1,432.4 hectares classified as rainfed but that they irrigated at some point between 2004 and 2014 “would be rewarded with their conversion into irrigable agricultural land”. “The illegals will not need to meet any other requirement, not even that the exploitation has continued over time or that they have not had administrative files or convictions.” “Since with the current wording of the Proposed Law, a single irrigation campaign between the mentioned years would suffice to go from dry land to irrigated land multiplied up to ten times its market value.”
He has indicated that the WWF analysis shows that from 2004, when the POTAD was approved, the irrigated hectares multiplied, knowing the illegals that they were violating the law and that they would have to illegally extract water from the aquifer to grow strawberries and red fruits. .
A decade of irrigation
In fact, according to the evidence obtained by WWF during the investigation, 70% of these rainfed hectares had never been irrigated before POTAD.
Along with these hectares, there is another 471.3 that could be legalized with the proposed Law based on the modification of the Forestry Law of Andalusia, in areas where farmers uprooted the masses of trees to plant illegal crops of strawberries and red fruits.
The bill qualifies these hectares first as agricultural land and, since they began to be irrigated between 2004 and 2014, converts them, in a second step, into irrigated agricultural land.
Both Fuentelsaz and Carmona have pointed out that this data will be transferred to the Board, the parliamentary groups, the European Commission and Unesco, and have had an impact on requesting the withdrawal of the proposed Law and the execution of the 2014 Strawberry Plan in its wording current. EFE