Agriculture is becoming deserted due to lack of economic profitability, we all know that some deserts or almost deserts due to the gold rush were filled with inhabitants. Politicians say that we have to fill the villages with services; here where I am there are services... for those who are left, the old people. Another paradox is that in Castilla-La Mancha they are raising property tax, when almost all of these properties are owned by pensioners, that is social policy.
Those who are still in the countryside have endured close to two hundred thousand thefts of crops, machinery, livestock in the last year alone in this community. None of them would be able to leave their payroll out in the open with an open envelope. The farmers' payroll has been wiped out for years with these beastly September floods.
In the fields, species disappear. Birds cannot live with so few insectsBecause we want fruit that does not have spots on it. Farmers are being attacked with ruinous prices and bureaucratic complications. Lettuce, peaches and other products, including dried fruit, are sold in supermarkets with a 500% mark-up, and nobody does anything about it, just like olive oil or potatoes, says the acting minister. The acting minister says it is the laws of the market. What laws? Because the bureaucratic complications, the health controls, the health guarantees that our products have, mean that production costs increase and we compete with the same products, but with production processes and costs that are not the same. In order to sell in the U.S.A., demanding sanitary quality protocols are required. Do we demand the same protocols from those we compete with as we do from our own products? Conclusion: We cannot compete and we will have wiped out the primary sector..
Without remedying this situation, subsidies are given to encourage young people to return to the countryside, which is not and will not be profitable to live from; that is why it remains without people, as long as many things do not change in the generation of agricultural prices and consumption, the main responsibility for which lies with the citizen who buys.
The result: 800,000 small livestock farms disappear every year, which sustain the villages where they are located. The very clever ones, among whom I do not include myself, say that these are the rules of the market. As I eat an apple from Chile, which has exhaled many kilos of CO2 into the atmosphere until it reaches my hand, I am surprised by the clever ones! Politicians, purchasing centres and citizens do not ask themselves why 75% has disappeared from fruit plantations in Spain. And, in no time at all, cereals. Villages are left empty because craftsmen, livestock and farms are being eliminated due to lack of profitability. Wages are not in line with productivity, they are far above it.
Olives from Extremadura
The minister is stunned when the interviewer points out that this year there has been a very low production of oil worldwide and the price in Spain is falling. This year they are leaving the olives from Extremadura in the olives and the oranges on their trees for lack of profit. If they had harvested them they would have to put money out of their pockets. The same is happening with milk, pulses that are exhaling CO2 on their way from Peru or fruit from Brazil. The big chains are involved in this, subjugating the consumer who looks at the prices on the shelves, the purchasing centres and the big distribution chains are in charge of this, attacking the producer in order to satisfy the citizen who is unaware of how his purchasing decision has an impact on the end of livestock farming and agriculture in Spain. This citizen who does not have many criteria, apart from the price, contributes to the collapse of the profitability of the countryside and, in a short time, almost all the food from the countryside will come from outside packaged in millions of tonnes of CO2.
In the village where I am writing this there are two of these young people, who have received the subsidy, have worked... and, in the end, nothing. Like those who abandoned those same lands before, without profitability, not even for subsistence. With prices, for example, of cereals from 30 years ago and costs to obtain them from the 21st century. I insist again: What is the price in terms of climate destruction of a fruit that comes from Chile to Spain, artichokes and asparagus from China, which exhale CO2 into the environment for their transport? With the same guarantees as asparagus from Navarre?
It is that we don't want to understand how we destroy our planet. The consumer has put an end to the possibility of growing vegetables, potatoes, oranges and perhaps olives in Spain.
José Antonio Rodríguez Piedrabuena
Specialist in Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis