The territorial delegate for Agriculture, Livestock and Fisheries, Aránzazu Martín, took part in the demonstration in Madrid in defence of the agricultural sector. At this event in front of the Ministry of Agriculture, Martin said that “from the Andalusian Government we want to show the unease of a sector that is suffering one of the biggest crises in decades due to the increase in production costs”.
Martín recalled that “the Andalusian Regional Government will ask the Ministry of Agriculture for urgent mechanisms to mitigate this increase in costs that farmers are facing”. In this sense, the territorial delegate assured that “the Andalusian Government is not going to back down, and will support, together with the other administrations, the measures that are proposed to tackle the circumstances that are currently affecting the agricultural sector”.
In her statements, the delegate affirmed that for Andalusia “the CAP is a priority issue because 12% of the region’s GDP corresponds to the activity of the countryside, a sector that generates employment and which over the years has given Andalusian rural areas the chance to maintain their population”. Aránzazu Martín stated that “the Andalusian government and the agricultural organisations representing the sector united against the change proposed by the central government and rejected the elimination of rights, the imposition of accelerated convergence, the possibility that ‘pluriactive’ farmers would no longer receive the CAP and the reduction of productive regions below 10”.
With regard to the eco-schemes, the delegate once again insisted that the eight types of soil proposed by the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food for the whole of Spain would be insufficient to represent “the diversity of agriculture in Andalusia”. In this way, she commented that on 29 November the National Strategic Plan for the new Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) begins its public information period, and stressed that the Andalusian Government “will not give up trying to achieve a greater number of eco-schemes”.