The nurseries of the Cellera de Ter and the Pastoral warn that, if the Catalan Water Agency (ACA) does not “open the tap”, they will be forced to close while they see “how the plants die”.
The problem is that the ACA does not allow the Molí de la Pardina irrigation community to capture water from the Ter and, therefore, cannot supply it to its partners.
Among them are two nurserymen who assure that, once they run out of water in their tanks, if it doesn’t rain, they will be forced to close with “everything that this entails.”
The manager of Vivers González, Toni González, explains that many of their plants cannot last much more than a day without watering. Furthermore, he assures that, if he loses a client, “it will cost a lot to get him back.”
If it doesn’t rain soon, at the end of this week the water that Toni González has in her nursery tank will run out. For days he has been stretching it by watering “much less than necessary” to keep his 180,000 plants alive. For this reason, he asks the ACA to give him a solution, since since last Tuesday the 16th they have not had water, because the irrigation community cannot provide it to them. The problem is that the community of Molí de la Pardina is exposed to a fine if it does so and this affects the more than 200 members within.
The drought decree prevents the community from collecting water from the Ter. Furthermore, the Gusó stream, from which they could fish, is dry and does not go down. González, however, regrets that the day they were told their water was being cut off coincided with the authorization to fill private pools, to use them as climate shelters. “It seems like they’re kidding you,” he laments.
The sector has wanted to support those affected and point out that there is no equal comparison with other economic activities.
For his part, the president of the Federación de Viveristes Agricultors de Catalunya, David Borda, assures that the possibility of going to find water in Girona to irrigate “is not viable” because the costs are high and would force them to affect sales.
All of this can be unraveled in the next discharge commission, scheduled for the beginning of May. Then, the ACA will assess whether water can be captured from the Ter or, on the contrary, maintain the restrictions in the community.
The problem is that the last commission in October gave the green light to Molí de la Pardina to collect water for six months, at which time it had to be reviewed again, but the Department has decided to postpone the commission until May. As the period ended in April, the community has been prevented from collecting water, under threat of sanction.
From the ACA they point out that in the next commission the allocations for each use will be defined based on the availability of water in the reservoirs, “analyzing the possibility that, despite the emergency, they may have greater availability of water.”
