Hardly any water in the reservoirs, extremely dry soil, lost harvests: Spain is struggling with increasingly severe droughts. There is financial support for farmers.
The Spanish government is helping the country’s farmers, who are plagued by drought, with a package worth billions. At an extraordinary meeting of the Council of Ministers in Madrid, aid measures and investments totaling almost 2.2 billion euros were decided, said the left-wing government of Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez.
According to official information, a first decree includes direct aid for agriculture and animal husbandry as well as tax breaks and state subsidies for insurance policies with a total value of 784 million euros. In addition, around 1.4 billion euros will be made available for the construction of new infrastructure such as water desalination plants.
“Spain has been struggling with droughts for years, but due to climate change they are getting worse,” said Minister for Ecological Transition Teresa Ribera. Extreme weather events would become more and more common in the future. The government stressed that the consequences of the war in Ukraine were also felt in the agricultural sector.
In some regions of Spain, such as Catalonia, the reservoirs are only 25 percent full on average. However, according to the Coordination Center for Farmers’ and Livestock Breeders’ Associations, the situation is also “alarming” in Andalusia, Extremadura, Castile-La Mancha, Murcia, Aragon, Madrid and Castile and León. There, among other things, the wheat and barley harvest this year would be considered practically “lost”.
The conservative opposition criticized the measures as insufficient and assured that Sánchez was relying on populist actions before the regional and local elections on May 28 and the general election later in the year. Opposition leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo said at a campaign event in Valencia that investments of at least 40 billion euros in the water sector over a period of ten years are urgently needed.
Source: Stern
