The Government urgently calls the agricultural sector after the announcement of mobilizations throughout Spain

David Vigario Merida

Merida

Updated Wednesday, January 31, 2024-12:43

The Government tries to ensure that the revolt in the agricultural sector in Spain - announced yesterday by the main agricultural organizations - does not reach the intensity and significance that it is producing in other European countries, such as Germany or France. So urgently the Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, Luis Planas, has called the agricultural leaders of ASAJA, COAG and UPA to a meeting this Friday at the ministry headquarters. It will, therefore, be one day after an important meeting in Brussels, with the holding of the European Council, where several proposals for environmental exemptions that can reduce the climate of tension among European farmers and ranchers will be debated.

Planas thus responds in less than 24 hours to the request for a meeting raised in the joint letter of these agrarian organizations that was sent yesterday to the minister, and where a calendar of mobilizations in the autonomous communities was announced to demand changes in the policies of the European Union, a shock plan of the Spanish Government and actions of the autonomous communities in the face of the crisis suffered by the sector.

In fact, today

the first mobilizations for next week

have already been announced in several parts of Spain (Cáceres, Badajoz, Zamora, Ávila, La Rioja...) . At the same time, and as EL MUNDO has learned, in mid-February - on a date yet to be specified - it is planned to carry out up

to 31 road closures at the same time at the same time and day throughout the country

. "The meeting with the minister is not going to stop the mobilizations," sources from the agrarian organizations warn in advance, which have begun to put in place the machinery to organize the mobilizations.

KEY DAY IN BRUSSELS

These protests reach the streets of Brussels this Thursday, where a large group of farmers and ranchers from these agricultural organizations will join the rally called by the European Coordination Via Campesina (ECVC). It is expected that hundreds of tractors will gather in Luxembourg Square in the Belgian capital to demand from the heads of the community institutions

the cessation of the EU's free trade agreements with third countries

, in the case of Mercosur, that imports comply the same regulations as European agricultural production and a flexibility and simplification of the costly bureaucratic burden of agricultural and environmental regulations, as well as special treatment for fallow land.

The governments of France, Germany and Italy will ask the European Council

for concrete measures for European farmers

, such as the reduction of environmental requirements as well as a more equitable distribution of agricultural budgets, especially the 50 billion euro item that the The EU plans to send Ukrainian farmers to alleviate the impact of the war, an amount that most countries consider exorbitant.