I fear for food sovereignty. If the farmers here do not continue, what will happen to the territory? Small towns of 300 inhabitants endure because there are farmers who live there with their families”. This is how Gemma Llanes Sagarra speaks, a farmer from Ivars d’Urgell who, with her husband, Xavier Viladot, runs Pomona Fruits, a small organic production company of pears, apples, apricots and Paraguayans.
“Politicians keep talking about the demographic challenge, but supporting the countryside would mean fighting against this empty territory”, he argues. And he calls on the Administration to control the quality of imported products and “demand the same standards as those here, both in organic and conventional production”.
Regarding the long agricultural crisis that has taken so many tractors off the roads, Gemma Llanes is convinced that “the fight is between family farming and agro-industry”, a situation in which, in addition to the European Union, from her point of view view, the Generalitat and the State could make things easier for farmers, from public purchases to awareness campaigns about the goodness of the local product.
He argues that the Administration buys fresh produce for hospitals or schools and that the tenders are always won by large agribusiness, “because they hold super-complicated public tenders without differentiating the size of the company, unlike in France, where large companies they have one bureaucracy, and the small ones, another”. He thinks that in these tenders the Catalan Administration could, for example, give extra points to local companies and small producers thinking about the territorial balance.
He also believes that the Administration could help raise awareness among consumers so that they opt for local production or, sweeping towards home, for organic products.
“We sell part of our production in March to Germany and we do it so late because German companies prefer their pears first. When they finish them in March, before they buy from South America, they buy from us.”
Give another example. One year when he couldn’t sell the apples he contacted a couple of French companies offering them at cost price and they told him that at that time the purchases did not depend on the price: if there were French apples, they didn’t buy apples from outside .
“This awareness – he says – does not exist in Spain, and the consumer must know that with their act of purchase they are helping the territory”.
She and her husband bet a few years ago to convert their fruit farms from conventional to organic production. They started with regenerative agriculture, based on maintaining the biodiversity of the earth with natural techniques, and over time they have made a firm commitment to biodynamic agriculture, which works with preparations obtained from medicinal plants, such as nettle broth or preparation of valerian, and takes into account the cycles of the moon.
The margins of their farms are full of aromatic plants and beehives to facilitate pollination, insect hotels for bees of the osmia variety, which do not sting. Precisely these days they are working on the placement of canes for this class of bees on the farms, because the heat advances their birth every year.
The Pomona Fruits conversion project from conventional to organic agriculture won in 2020 the fourth edition of the BBVA Best Sustainable Producers awards. Four years later, Gemma Llanes is one of the twelve women who started the “Lleida, land of transformative women” project, with which the Government Delegation promotes a shared agenda for rural women.
small and large
the winter
of discontent
