After the blockade in Paris and the mobilizations of the agricultural and livestock sector last week in Brussels, the agricultural associations of the Valencian Community have activated a protest plan, qualifying “Valencian style”, to take advantage of the fact that the media focus is on these weeks about the agricultural crisis. It is the reading of Carles Peris, general secretary of La Unió Llauradora i Ramadera, who recalls that the most forceful protests of the last five years have led to the union of these associations.
“The truly positive thing is that we are going together to show uniformity in the protest and convey our proposals to both the Government delegate and President Carlos Mazón and the ministers of the sector, (José Luis) Aguirre and (Salomé) Pradas. There is a structural crisis of the agricultural and livestock sector,” Peris resolves.
The Unió is one of the entities calling for a calendar of mobilizations that will take hand in hand with the Valencian Association of Farmers (AVA-ASAJA), ASAJA Alicante, the Peasant Coordinator of the Valencian Country (CCPV-COAG) and the Union of Small Farmers and Ranchers (UPA-PV), with the support of the Agro-alimentàries Cooperatives of the Valencian Community.
They argue that “the profitability crisis of farmers and ranchers is accelerating the abandonment of fields, which causes the depopulation of rural areas and the increase in food prices for consumers.” AVA-ASAJA already began its protests in the Valencian Community this past with a rally in Utiel-Requena, a region that is especially suffering from the profitability crisis of wine, almonds, olive groves, cereals and livestock, among other sectors.
The Valencian countryside thus picks up the French baton and plans mobilizations with the focus on the ports, because they are a “symbol of imports,” explains Peris, which generates so many difficulties for the sector. For this reason, there will be mobilizations in the province of Alicante next Monday, February 12, and also in the port of Castelló on February 15 and in the port of València on February 22.
In addition, these three dates are joined by the call that La Unió set for tomorrow, Wednesday, weeks ago, which will take its protests to the port of Castelló to demand the elimination of the port tax bonus for citrus imported from third countries.
As Peris explains, the complaints from the European agricultural sector show that there are many aspects in which the protests coincide, “and in the end it is a symptom of clear suffocation in the face of a sector that does not see itself represented even in the policies to save the agricultural sector, nor in very ambitious commitments,” he reflects.
