Germany threatens to boycott Spanish ‘drought strawberries’ – 06/19/2023 – Market

A dispute over water use in Spain’s agricultural sector, where water is a scarce resource, risks undermining one of Spain’s most recognizable exports in European supermarkets: strawberries.

Teresa Ribera, the Socialist environment minister, told the Financial Times that some strawberry farmers were facing “real risks to their reputation” from a campaign by a German activist group to boycott what it dubbed “drought strawberries”.

The dispute has its roots in legislation proposed by Andalusia’s conservative government, which critics say would regularize up to 1,000 illegal wells used by farmers, risking draining one of Europe’s most important wetlands, Doñana.

This comes at a time when water scarcity is becoming an increasingly critical problem in Europe, where temperatures are rising faster than on any other continent and tensions are growing between multiple water users and demands for environmental protection. .

The conflict fuels tensions between the ruling Socialist Party (PSOE) and the conservative People’s Party. Last week, a day after being seriously defeated in the regional elections by the PP, which won in several regions previously in the hands of the Socialists, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez called an early general election.

Ribera, who is also deputy prime minister, said the Andalusian plan was “generating panic”. She accused regional president Juan Manuel Moreno Bonilla of “calculated ambiguity” for suggesting that strawberry farmers could use all the water they wanted without acknowledging that doing so would reduce Doñana’s groundwater level.

The proposal led the left-wing German activist organization Campact to urge large supermarket chains such as Lidl and Aldi to stop buying produce grown around Doñana, part of Huelva, a province in Andalusia that produces strawberries and other berries.

The organization claims that Spain is risking disaster in order to grow low-priced strawberries for German consumers. A petition she launched online has already garnered around 160,000 signatures. After Germany, which last year imported €196 million worth of Spanish strawberries, the sector’s biggest export markets are the UK, France and Italy.

Ribera said she is deeply concerned about the call for a boycott. “Law-abiding strawberry farmers in Spain, who have the right to use water, don’t deserve the reputational risk created by Moreno Bonilla’s initiative,” she said.

Compounding the situation, 35% of Spain, including Huelva, is under the effect of a prolonged drought, according to the central government.

EU Environment Commissioner Virginijus Sinkevičius, who is stepping up the bloc’s attention to the issue of water scarcity, visited Doñana in April to show support for the central government in its opposition to the Andalusian law. His trip was immediately branded political by the European People’s Party, of which Spain’s PP is a member, who accused him of campaigning for the socialists. Lithuanian Green politician Sinkevičius denied the allegation.

This week a delegation of nine German MPs, representing all the country’s political parties, will visit Spain on a mission to investigate the Doñana issue. The delegation is expected to have discussions with the regional government of Andalusia and the central government in Madrid.

Aldi Nord, a division of the supermarket chain that spans Spain and northern Germany, said that since mid-2022 it has required all its Andalusian fruit and vegetable suppliers to be certified as meeting accepted standards for irrigation and sustainable water use. underground.

The PP says its legislative plan is aimed at responding to the legitimate economic concerns of agricultural producers, reversing a 2014 law -passed when Andalusia’s government was socialist- which ended the classification of a swath of territory as agricultural land and annulled their land rights. water. The conservatives, who in the last regional elections increased their share of the vote in the area around Doñana, have the backing of the far-right Vox party to change the law.

Any wells drilled in the region since 2014 are now illegal. Ribera said the central government has closed 700 of those wells. But authorities struggle to identify all the wells and their users because they are often hidden under vegetation and only accessed in the early morning. The PSOE has also been criticized for not doing more to protect Doñana, including in the period up to 2019 when it ruled Andalusia.

The European Commission said the Andalusian proposal contravenes a 2021 European Court of Justice ruling that ordered Spain to take action.

The PP says the law it proposes “will not harm the Doñana aquifer in any way”, but will allow the collection of surface water. The central government rejected this argument. On Friday the PP said it would allow a prominent biologist who has been critical of its plan to testify before the Andalusian parliament, revoking his earlier exclusion.