The irrigators of the Urgell canal have been able to irrigate again for a few days to try to guarantee the survival of the trees. They irrigate as they have been doing for more than 160 years, when this great infrastructure was built. That is, with the flood irrigation system, also known as blanket irrigation, which is a large consumer of water.
“How do you explain that 50% of Catalan agricultural production continues to irrigate due to flooding?” Joan Gaya, a member of the water working group of the Col·legi d’Enginyers Industrials de Catalunya, asked the audience at a conference organized by this entity. In the most arid areas of Spain, this type of irrigation has been reduced to represent 4.2% in Castilla-La Mancha, 13.6% in Murcia or 15.4% in Andalusia.
“There is still a long way to go in the modernization of irrigation in Catalonia”, warns Ignasi Servià, secretary of the Water Commission of the College of Agricultural Engineers of Catalonia. And it is a road that must be covered, yes or no, according to Conxita Villar, dean of this same institution: “We cannot produce less food because the world population does not stop growing, and if we want to produce more food without occupying more land, we have to implement more irrigation because they offer yields four times higher than rainfed, but these must obviously be more efficient”. At the meeting of the College of Industrial Engineers, Villar recalled that “the irrigated agricultural area of ??Catalonia is a quarter of the irrigated agricultural area of ??the State as a whole”.
During the conference, several weighty arguments were made that urge the modernization of irrigation in the current climate crisis scenario. The main one is that agriculture is, by far, the first water consumer sector, representing 78% of water consumption in Catalonia, 80.5% in Spain as a whole and up to 92% in the areas belonging to the Ebro Hydrographic Confederation. Water consumption must be reduced at the same time that the water needs of crops increase due to less rainfall and higher temperatures, which increase evapotranspiration.
Ignasi Servià also recalled that food sovereignty in Catalonia is around 40%: “If there is more and more population and we do not increase the efficiency of irrigation, we will have less and less food sovereignty.” The problem is global: “According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), food production should increase by 70% by the year 2050 to feed 9,000 million inhabitants,” said Antonio Enjuanes, deputy director General of Rural Infrastructures in the Department of Climate Action, Food and Rural Agenda.
The works related to the construction of new irrigation systems and their modernization are financed, to a large extent, by the Generalitat, as they are considered country infrastructures. However, farmers are often reluctant to carry out these investments due to various pitfalls, such as what is known as land consolidation, which reduces construction and installation costs, but requires the owners to agree to exchange and pool their farms. If these obstacles were overcome, industry sources estimate that a modernized Urgell canal would go from requiring around 10,000 m³ of water per hectare and irrigation season to 6,000 m³.
Gabriel Borràs, head of the adaptation area at the Catalan Climate Change Office, is clear: “There will be no smart cities if we don’t care about the territory that supplies us with water and food.”
