Asaja Castile-La Mancha will mobilize in the last week of October to demand that the government assume its responsibility and protect the Spanish agricultural and livestock sector. Eight months after the February protests, the agricultural organization assures that neither the national government nor the European Union have provided a solution to the problems of the countryside.
“The agricultural sector is facing a planting campaign full of risks and uncertainties due to inaction and the lack of measures that protect the national product and in the face of this situation of satiety and suffocation that we are suffering, we want to recover the spirit of the month of February mobilizations and go out on the streets,” the agricultural organization said in a statement.
Asaja recalls that the February mobilizations were paralyzed because The government signed a document of 43 measures with some agricultural organisations which, in its opinion, have been of no use“Asaja did not sign this document because he considered it clearly insufficient and now we see it with a devastating scenario, prices at their lowest and losses that endanger not only farms, but also food sovereignty,” they say.
In this regard, the agrarian organization has already repeatedly requested that Ministry of Agriculture and European Union concrete actions with the imports of cereals that arrive from countries such as Russia and Ukraine and that lower prices. “The European Union must react and establish protective measures for the agricultural sector, as it does for other industrial sectors, such as the automobile, to which it seems to pay more attention”, they say from Asaja, who blames the collapse of prices in the markets up to the operations in the ports, where they assure that “ships full of cereals arrive from other countries and this excess of goods causes ruinous prices with drops in recent weeks of more than 10%”.
They also demand controls on the traceability and conditionality of cereals from third countries so that they “comply with the same standards that they demand from Spanish farmers and the application of dissuasive tariffs or the increase in intervention prices that prevent the price at the port from causing the collapse” of cereals produced in our country.
Spain is a country with a deficit in cereal production and must import between 15 and 20 million tonnes per year to cover its needs. which focus mainly on livestock feed. The situation of dry cereals has gone from temporary to a structural problem. High costs and low prices lead to a lack of profitability for farmers who are gradually stopping devoting their land to cereals.
The organisation has already highlighted the contradiction of European policies which, on the one hand, allocate funds to integrate young people into agriculture and, at the same time, allow the sector to get bogged down in a price crisis that makes its profitability unviable.
In the coming weeks, Asaja will announce the dates and locations of the mobilizations, hoping that all farmers and herders who wish to show their support will join them. rejection of current EU and Spanish government policies and this fully affects the agri-food sector and, consequently, the entire society that depends on it for its survival.
