The central government and the Junta of Andalusia have reached, after weeks of negotiations and months of hostilities, an agreement on Doñana that will be presented today by the Minister of Ecological Transition and Demographic Challenge, Teresa Ribera, and the Andalusian president, Juanma Moreno The axes of the pact will be the protection of the difficult ecological balance of the area and the compensations to the farmers, according to sources familiar with the pact.
The Board explained yesterday that President Moreno and Minister Ribera will today offer a joint press conference and sign the protocol for the sustainable territorial development of the area of ??influence of the natural area of ??Doñana. The details of the agreement have not been revealed, but ecologists trust that the Board will definitively park the controversial law that provided for the expansion of irrigation and that began to be processed in the Andalusian Parliament, with the rejection not only of the ecologists themselves, but of the European Commission, the scientific community and the opposition.
So it became known that the intention of the Board was to extend the irrigation, the Central Government expressed its strong protest. And he was not alone. European authorities and even Unesco, among other institutions, as well as environmental groups, supported the criticism. The Executive of Juanma Moreno said he was acting in favor of farmers, but there were also representatives of this sector who protested against the project, as it could affect the ecosystem of the park. The permits to further drain the damaged aquifers in the area said it was “bread for today and hunger for tomorrow”. In order for the negotiation to come to fruition, the president of the Board, Juanma Moreno, suspended the processing of the bill in Parliament and opened a one-month deadline to build bridges between the opposing parties and, according to his words , “always listening to the farmers”. The time planned for the negotiation ran out a couple of weeks ago and, with the deadline, so did the patience of the environmental defenders, who finally saw how the imminent signing of a pact was announced yesterday. Doñana, they say, “can’t wait any longer”.
Before the public presentation of the agreement, the president of the Doñana Participation Council, Miguel Delibes, at the suggestion of the Board, has called the members of the Doñana Participation Council to a meeting to inform them of the content at the Salvador theater Távora de Almonte (Huelva).
On October 3rd, Moreno and Ribera announced, after a meeting, that the approval of the proposed law for the organization of the irrigated areas of the Northern Crown of Doñana in the Andalusian Parliament was being postponed and that they were launching a “dialogue” with all the parties, at the beginning of a month, to find a solution both to this issue and to the territorial development of the region.
For this reason, a working group was formed which met on October 9 and which, from then until now, has held meetings and received contributions from the various economic and social agents in the region to seek a solution that is so consensual as possible
As indicated at the time, the agreement will be similar to that of the Mar Menor Technical Office (Murcia) and will aim to mark the priority actions in the Andalusian national park and protect the ecosystem together with the socio-economic conditions in the area
After the one-month deadline, representatives of the Board of Andalusia and the Spanish Government have called for prudence on several occasions and have always been optimistic about the possibility of reaching an agreement.
The Platform in Defense of County Irrigators, which represents the farmers who would benefit from the new Parliament regulation, requested a few days ago that the initiative return to the Andalusian Chamber for debate and approval, a request to which was added vox
