The Mayor of Almuñécar issued a band on Tuesday the 9th calling for everybody to go easy with the water supply – things look grim!.
Grim though for the farmers, as they calculate that if it does not rain in the next two weeks; i.e. before August is out, the drought will take its toll on the fruit harvests.
The Mayor also sent a letter to the Junta saying that Almuñécar’s campo was “teetering on the edge a catastrophe,” adding that if Almuñécar does not receive the water it needs within a fortnight, “Valle Río Verde will have died of thirst and with it the local economy.”
Dramatic stuff of course – nothing like the smell of burning hyperbole in the morning air! But even so, things are pretty tight, or better said, will be before the month is out.
On a roll, she went on to complain that the Junta had sat on its hands after receiving several requests from Almuñécar for urgent action. She also promised that she would bang on every door it takes to get a solution going.
Meanwhile, the farmers via the association of irrigation users, pointed out that several irrigation wells had already dried up and that the underground water level is 1.5m below the hitherto minimum level experienced.
According to the prose-enhanced Mayor, the Environmental Department of the Junta has all the paperwork and reports that it requested to authorise the refilling of the water table (with processed water from the sewage recycling plant (EDAR). It just remains to be decided exactly how it is to be done. Consequently Mayor Herrera calls for “celerity” from the Junta; i.e., to get its finger out.
Editorial comment: Domestic water consumption is a small fraction of water use, so cutting back on it is more symbolic than a solution. The main consumers of water are industry and agriculture. We have none of the first and plenty of the second.
Whilst the farmers are wringing their hands and indulging in frenzied lamentations, the fact is that a high percentage of the vega still uses riego a manta, or in other words, sloshing copious amounts of water around the plantation along furrows between the trees. It is the most wasteful system around and a left over from when there was plenty of water – back in the old days when it used to rain for a month solid.
However, the overriding problem is that both farmers and politicians think you can just build and plant interminably and that lacking natural resources will have to be provided by higher authorities. It doesn’t matter whether it is an urban-development plan that aims to triple the amount of existing dwellings in the township or whether it is a farmer that decides to terrace yet another hillside and plant irrigation-dependent crops – there is simply a limit to natural resources.
(News: Almunecar, Costa Tropical, Granada, Andalucia)