Mango: the fruit that made Malaga desert

According to Efe, the draft National Strategy to Combat Desertification states that between 2008 and 2018, farmland decreased by 3%, while those related to irrigated woody crops such as mango increased by 2.1% during the same period.

Among the provinces most affected by soil loss, Malaga takes the lead with Barcelona with an average loss of 90 tons per hectare per year.In the National Soil Erosion Inventory (INES), the La Axarquia region is listed as “the Malaga region most affected by this process”.

Mango, a profitable but destructive fruit

According to data from the Prices and Markets Observatory, With more than 4,296 hectares of plantation (90% of Andalusia), Malaga homes, the largest mango plantation in SpainAccording to the coordinator of GENA-Ecologistas en Acción Rafael Yus, it is a “profitable” fruit that requires very little labor to work.

Yus, Axarquia, where the main concentration of this fruit is located, is traditionally a mountainous area where “dry farming abounds on the slopes, constructing terraces or balats to prevent soil loss”.

However, the conversion of these rain-fed crops to subtropical irrigated crops such as mango or avocado accompanied by the use of heavy machinery“It’s something that never happened and It damages the soil by removing all vegetation and destroying the land.».

“When we talk about desertification, we tend to think of land loss because it’s the most visual,” Yus emphasizes, and “there are other forms of degradation,” such as that occurring at La Axarquia. regarding the “loss of quality in the soil”.

Expert reports that mango plantations are depleting the region’s water resources “to the point where desalination plants are considered to be used to supply water to the population”and thus be able to allocate all the dam water to agriculture».

They want the board to intervene.

Yus, «crops don’t need as much water as their owners demands” and claims that “excess water is sold by farmers to ranchers who have already exceeded the permissible limit.”

For all these reasons, Yus demands that the Andalusian Government intervene to “improve the irrigation system” and “limit the hectares reserved for the team”.

Gabriel del Barrio of the Arid Zones Experiment Station, The danger of giving foreign products such as mangoes a “nature letter” in Spain, because “change in use use requires increasing profits in an increasingly smaller and less protected region”.

Therefore, the National Strategy to Combat Desertification emphasizes the “existence of vegetation” that protects the soil from erosion, not the type of crop.

But while del Barrio says this proposition is true when it comes to rain-fed crops, For irrigated crops like mango, “cover not only protects the soil from erosion, it also becomes a risk factor.”

In this context, Greenpeace water technician Julio Barea gives the example of the cornfields around the Los Monegros desert (Aragón); The crop next to a desert is inexplicable. ”

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