Spain is considered the ‘garden of Europe’ due to the large amount of fruit, vegetables and vegetables it exports to EU countries. Still, the future of this business is uncertain, because unstoppable progress desertification from the country. Increasingly scarce water could become a luxury for Spain and the new ‘oil’, an expensive and scarce resource that everyone will fight for. 80% of all fresh water in the country goes to agriculture.
Soil degradation in Spain has tripled in the last 10 yearsAccording to CSIC’s Arid Zones Experiment Station (EEZA), which has created “an irreversible problem on a human scale,” that organization’s researcher Gabriel del Barrio told AFP.
This situation makes soils are not capable of holding water or organic matterand therefore no longer suitable for growing crops or feeding livestock. This poses a serious threat to a country where agriculture exports €60,000 million annually.
“Soil erosion is currently the main problem for most farmers in Spain,” says the Small Farmers and Farmers Association (UPA).
“Spain won’t be a desert with sand dunes like the Sahara, that’s morphologically impossible,” Del Barrio told the agency. However, desertification severe soil degradation causing it to lose its productive capacityIt is an increasingly serious problem in the country.
HE global warming causing higher temperatures, which causes more water evaporation, leading to more forest fires. But apart from that, intensive agriculture It is also one of the causes of soil destruction due to the aggressive techniques it uses to achieve large productions.
An example is Almeria, which has become the garden of Europe thanks to its 40,000-hectare greenhouses, a ‘sea of plastic’ visible even from space, despite its dry climate. Thousands of tons of vegetables and pulses are produced there throughout the year. However, its price is high: it consumes large production areas ground-water and depletes the aquifers, del Barrio adds. However, this situation does not occur only in Almería.
United Nations program against desertification, 75% of Spain’s territory is faced with climatic conditions that lead to desertification.and in fact, our country is the European country most affected by this problem.
Alternative: less aggressive apps
In the face of this situation, there are more initiatives aimed at achieving success. a sustainable agriculture that avoids penalizing the soil, the resource this activity depends on. In Andalusia, for example, there is a farmers’ association called AlVelAl, which is launching “regenerative” practices to stop the erosion of the region’s soil.
used by its members fertilizer instead of chemical fertilizerthey avoid pesticides that kill beneficial insects as much as possible, limit their “soil-harming” farming use, and use plant matter to conserve moisture and prevent it from evaporating.
Speaking to AFP, one of these farmers, Juan Antonio Merlos, confirms: “This is a long-term business”, because “in theory, it takes seven years to see results from regenerative agriculture.” However, he says he’s already beginning to notice promising differences in the soil and insects in his fields.
Reduce irrigated area
Here, as in other parts of Spain, new techniques for maximum water savings in irrigation are applied, as well as the promotion of alternative crops to irrigated land. In fact, Spanish scientists and experts strongly recommend replacing irrigated areas with dry land to put an end to excessive water consumption.
Biologist and ecologist Fernando Maestre Gil says:More than 40% of our aquifers suffer from contamination (due to substances such as nitrates) and/or overuse”. For this reason and due to increasing water scarcity, it commits to reduce irrigated areas in Spain.
“We need to reduce the irrigated area”. This was due to “a moratorium on the introduction of new irrigation systems and conversion of some of these crops to dry farming,” he detailed.
“To do this, we must consider the consumption of water and crops and their social returns, prioritizing those that create more jobs and redistribute wealth more effectively,” he said.
“He stated that reducing water consumption goes through r.To reduce its use in agriculture, which consumes more than 80% of all fresh water used in Spain”.
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