• Doñana The strawberry war puts in check almost 600 million in Spanish exports
  • Andalusia The German Parliament suspends its visit to Andalusia due to the conflict with the Doñana strawberry so as not to interfere in the elections

There will be no visit by German deputies to Doñana for the time being. The trip organized by a delegation of parliamentarians to Spain that aimed to learn how climate change and water resources in agriculture are managed from Andalusia has been abruptly interrupted to prevent it from becoming a weapon on the eve of a general election in Spain.

The embassy in Spain reported this morning the suspension of the expedition when the parliamentarians were already meeting at the Ministry for the Ecological Transition with the Secretary of State for the Environment, Hugo Morán, in what was going to be the first stop of his visit.

Subsequently, they intended to visit several Andalusian provinces, including Huelva or Almería, to learn how irrigation water is managed in a context of drought. But what had ignited the controversy and the alarms of the Junta de Andalucía is the visit they had planned to Doñana, in the midst of a strong controversy over the campaign that calls for a boycott against the red fruits of the surroundings of the National Park.

The Andalusian Government had understood the trip of the parliamentarians of the Bundestag as one more of those that occur at the end of the year in the institutions to know specific aspects of the management of countries with shared interests. But, at the same time, he feared that the central government would turn it into a kind of external audit around the management that the Board carries out of Doñana and its controversial bill for the expansion of irrigation in the county region.

In this regard, the Government of Spain has not hesitated to echo the risks that a legalization of new irrigation could pose for the water reserves of Doñana in its communications addressed to the authorities and countries of the European Union, despite the fact that, at the moment, there is nothing approved and that, even if the initiative goes ahead, it will have no effect in the medium term on the situation of the Doñana aquifer. The text expressly prohibits the capture of underground resources and conditions the risks to the availability of surface water from transfers.

However, the Board has also recriminated that both Minister Teresa Ribera and the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, echoed last week the boycott campaign that has launched in Germany a consumer platform against the strawberry of Huelva.

For all these reasons, the People's Party had contacted its MEPs to alert German parliamentarians of the risk of "instrumentalization" of their visit on the eve of an election campaign. Both Juan Ignacio Zoido and Esteban González Pons addressed the deputies of the German CDU to warn them of the partisan use that was being made of the visit, and to warn them that it could be interpreted as a "political interference" in the middle of the electoral campaign.

In view of this background, the delegation of the Committee on the Environment, Nature Protection, Nuclear Safety and Consumer Protection of the German Bundestag (Parliament) informed, through the German ambassador to Spain, of its decision to "renounce for the moment its long-planned trip to Andalusia ». Although he also clarified that his intention was strictly "to exchange technical information on a topic that interests" both countries, such as climate change and its consequences.

The Board immediately applauded the suspension. His Minister of Sustainability and Environment, Ramón Fernández-Pacheco, said that the German deputies had shown "more institutional loyalty and common sense" than the Government of Spain.

  • Doñana
  • Esteban González Pons
  • Germany
  • Government of Spain
  • PP
  • Huelva
  • Almeria
  • Teresa Ribera
  • Juan Ignacio Zoido

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