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Salamanca (EFE) politicians for bovine tuberculosis control measures.
After these incidents, EFE has contacted several of the representatives of these confronted sectors, with problems stuck for decades and other more recent ones.
Just yesterday the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Rural Development called a meeting on Tuesday “to talk”, but Union for Livestock, the platform that brings together 22 associations from Salamanca, has rejected the meeting as long as they are not offered changes in the protocols it establishes European and state regulations.
“Why do we want a meeting if they have nothing to offer us? A meeting like the previous 100? We will continue with the protests until they offer us alternative solutions, we have had the same protocols for 40 years,” the organization’s spokesman, Juan Luis Delgado, explained to EFE.
Bovine tuberculosis tests
The farmers ask that the protocols of this sanitation and the test that is done to their cows be modified because they understand that it is not 100% accurate and, as a precaution, cattle are sent to the slaughterhouse that later turn out to be healthy in a second analysis.
First, the now president of the Board, Alfonso Fernández Mañueco (PP), when he was a candidate in 2019, and now Vox, at the head of the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock, promised farmers to make these measures more flexible, which recently materialized in a order before the 28M elections, but the central government, endorsed on Monday by the Superior Court of Justice of Castilla y León, has prevented it.
The vice president of the Board, Juan García-Gallardo (Vox), met on May 26 with Salamanca farmers in Vitigudino to tell them that that Thursday he had been in Brussels “defending the sector against the arbitrary impositions of the 2020 regulation on bovine tuberculosis”.
After the ranchers’ attempt to forcibly enter the Board’s headquarters in Salamanca, neither Vox nor Gallardo have spoken about it, nor on social networks where they usually talk about tuberculosis sanitation as something “that drowns” farm workers, although the Board, through its spokesman, Carlos Fernández Carriedo (PP), has maintained that they intend to continue with the aspiration of flexibility within the law.
Tense climate between farmers and veterinarians
The spokesman for the Unión por la Ganadería directly pointed out on Monday the Union of Veterinarians of Castilla y León SIVECAL as one of the groups that are “promoting the continued mistreatment of the rancher.”
Asked by Efe about this, the president of SIVECAL, Manuel Martínez, said: “We are not encouraging anything, the only thing we have done is publish a detailed report of all the irregularities contained in the resolution of the Board (the one that made the protocols more flexible and overturned Justice)”.
And he added: “We have always been on the side of the farmers and we will continue to be so. We are the first interested in improving these tests, they are not infallible as none is, but if there are doubts it is like with the covid, in a preventive way you try not to infect those who live with you ”.
Boycott of sanitation and stoppage of fairs
The ranchers denounce that it harms them not only when they kill cows that are later healthy, but also that “when an animal tests positive, they prohibit the movement of the rest of your animals, both to the feedlot and to pasture,” explains Jesús María, a rancher. who was at the protest in the Junta and prefers not to give his last name due to the tension that exists in the sector.
“They are putting the rancher on a war footing, with this there are more and more hot people, what happened yesterday came out in the media and unfortunately it is the only way”, pointed out this rancher who declares himself “apolitical”, who has changed his voted “three times” in recent times and rejects being identified with a political party.
Unión por la Ganadería, given the “impotence” that the Board transferred to them on Monday, announces that they will boycott the sanitation as of June 12, mobilizing people so that they cannot be carried out, and they will also paralyze the fairs of the province, including the important Salamanca fair in September. EFE