Opinion piece by Alfonso Callejero on the agricultural sector and the European Elections of June 2024
February may seem a long time ago, and memory can deceive us. It was a month in which we talked and planned a lot, especially how to get around, because the farmers took to the roads to block them and demand better business and working conditions.
Ultimately, beyond the noise of the far right, they were demanding that Europe be fairer to them, regulate in their favor, and end free trade agreements. These agreements would limit access for food products arriving from outside Europe at a lower cost and with fewer quality controls than those within Europe. In this sense, the farmers were demanding that their own produce be valued, as it is of higher quality and obviously produced at a higher cost than that from non-European countries.
This, which seems so distant, is important to remember because this Sunday we are all deciding how to build the European Union for the next five years. We have to decide if we want the parties that have favored free trade agreements with other countries to govern and regulate, while simultaneously continuing to promote more and more agreements with other countries. This will clearly harm the agriculture of our region. Or, if we want a strong and healthy agricultural sector, we must know which parties have rejected these free trade agreements. Ultimately, these agreements mean the influx of cheaper products with fewer health controls into our diet, a clear disadvantage for local production in our region.
But we don't just vote based on agricultural issues; if we vote for parties that deny climate change, reject global warming, and ignore the fact that this past May was the eleventh hottest month on record globally, we will also be setting ourselves up for policies that will not protect the environment and will exacerbate climate change, with the obvious problems this entails for our agricultural industry. The persistent drought we are experiencing, exemplified by the current low flow of the Cinca River, is not lost on anyone.
In this sense, supporting parties that deny climate change or lack initiatives to combat it leads us to enable policies that promote desertification and more severe droughts. Furthermore, we must bear in mind that in Spain, 80% of environmental legislation is bound by or subject to European Union regulations. Therefore, supporting parties of this nature is detrimental to our own interests and will leave a barren legacy for our children.
Therefore, our vote in the European elections will greatly influence the interests of the Bajo Cinca region. If this Sunday we support parties that play with ambiguity or demagoguery, deny climate change, and simultaneously wave a Spanish flag on a tractor while in Brussels they almost systematically vote against the interests of the farmers they claim to defend in our region, we will be promoting the next tractor protest and drought.
