The Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, Luis Planas, has reiterated the Government's firm commitment to the development of sustainable irrigation, which will have the largest public investment in recent decades.
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This will allow a great advance not only in environmental sustainability, resource efficiency and modernization, but also in increasing productivity and profitability in the agricultural sector.
For the minister, the future of irrigation will be sustainable "yes or yes", which inevitably involves undertaking its modernization. As he has emphasized, technology, innovation and digitization are necessary tools to achieve efficient and sustainable irrigation.
For this, the funds of the Recovery Plan together with the ordinary agreement of the ministry with the State Mercantile Society of Agrarian Infrastructures (Seiasa) will allow to mobilize a historical figure of 1,243 million euros in the period 2021-2026, which represents almost 200,000 hectares irrigated area and more than 20,000 irrigators benefited.
Luis Planas has participated in the closing of the technical conference "Irrigation, a response to the Government's agenda", of the National Federation of Irrigation Communities of Spain (Fenacore) with whom the ministry maintains an "excellent dialogue" in the important irrigation actions that are already being carried out throughout Spain.
He stressed that the significant financial endowment from European funds will contribute to making the agri-food sector more competitive, modern, profitable and attractive to women and young people.
In his speech, the minister has associated the significant growth of agricultural production in recent decades with the promotion of irrigation. Its constant growth between 2000 and 2020 has caused an increase in the value of agricultural production (without livestock) of 36%, going from 22,400 million euros in 2000 to 30,400 million in 2020.
As he has specified, Spanish irrigation is a success story and one of the most competitive in the world, since it only occupies 23% of the cultivated area and generates 65% of the final agricultural production. Together with generational change and digitization, irrigation will support the agricultural activity model of the immediate future.
To continue in this line of growth, the minister has indicated that the agricultural sector must face a series of challenges, such as adapting to the effects of climate change. The lower availability of water will force a paradigm shift in management models and the gradual adaptation of irrigation to available resources.
All this, he added, in accordance with international agreements on the fight against climate change and with community policies framed in the European Green Pact.
To promote the modernization of irrigation, Planas recalled that Spain will have the financing of the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan (PRTR), the funds of the new Common Agricultural Policy and with General State Budgets assigned to the Ministry of Agriculture, Fishing and Food the largest game in its history.
It has specified that the "Plan for the improvement of efficiency and sustainability in irrigation", endowed with 563 million euros, takes 54% of the total of Component 3 of the Recovery Plan managed by the ministry.
Within this framework, 93 actions have been selected, with a total budget of 810 million euros, plus public and private funding. This plan is already underway, after the signing of the first agreement between the ministry and Seiasa (in June, for an amount of 260 million euros), and after the first signatures of the agreements with the irrigation communities, this November.
Likewise, the minister explained that in the Strategic Plan of the PAC, irrigated agriculture has been specifically contemplated in direct aid, with the maintenance of several regions of irrigated farmland in the decoupled payment model and with eco-schemes. specific, and in the EAFRD with the intervention "Investments in irrigation with environmental objectives".
The minister has ensured that all actions must be in accordance with the new Hydrological Plans, since it is in them where the regulatory framework is established to achieve environmental objectives, achieve a balance between regional and sectoral development and knowledge of the available resources.
In this sense, it has emphasized that the dialogue and coordination between the agrarian and hydrological policy has made it possible to incorporate, in the proposal for the third cycle of hydrological planning, numerous strategic works in discharge that will allow the completion of the infrastructures in retirement, necessary for the improvement of some irrigation systems that had not been initially included in the public information process.
To facilitate the use of new technologies, he pointed out that the ministry is promoting the use of new technologies by irrigators, through initiatives such as the Agroclimatic Information System for irrigation (SIAR), the National Center for Irrigation Technology (Center), where the future Digital Innovation Hub will be installed, financing operational groups and innovative projects, with almost 82.5 million euros from the National Rural Development Program (2014-2022) and the Sector's Digitization Strategy Agrifood and Forestry and the Rural Environment. ■