The Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food points out that between 2022 and 2027 the agricultural sector will receive the largest public investment in irrigation, tripling the annual average made in the last two decades, since 2000.
Together with irrigation communities, Spain will launch an ambitious investment plan to transform agriculture: make it more sustainable, competitive and forward-looking to attract young people.
The Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, Luis Planas, said today that the Government is committed to sustainable irrigation, key to the future of the agri-food sector and to promote the necessary generational replacement. He stressed that, between 2022 and 2027, will be carried out the largest public investment for the modernization of irrigation, with a total of 2,137 million euros, a figure that triples the annual average invested in the first two decades of this century.
If the average annual investment between 2000 and 2021 has been 133 million euros, between 2022 and 2027 will rise to 425 million euros, he detailed. Planas has also recognized the work and effort of irrigation communities to join the "opportunity" that involves the injection of public and private funds to undertake the modernization of irrigation to make them increasingly sustainable, profitable and competitive.
The Minister closed today the XV National Congress of Irrigation Communities that has taken place these days in León, organized by the National Federation of Irrigators of Spain (Fenacore) and by the Central Union of the Barrios de Luna Reservoir, which "has brought together the great family of Spanish irrigation".
Planas stressed that these funds are intended to generate the necessary transformation of the agricultural production model, with the application of new technologies, digitization and innovation to achieve better management of water resources, increasingly scarce, but also to attract young people to a sustainable, profitable and forward-looking production, in an increasingly competitive market.
The minister pointed out that it is necessary to achieve competitive sustainability in order to respond to the challenges of the 21st century, "to produce more with fewer resources and to guarantee the continuity of stable, profitable and competitive production".
He assured that "the coherence between agrarian and hydrological policy is total", and reiterated that the Government is committed to sustainable irrigation because it multiplies agricultural productivity sixfold, increases farmers' income by up to four times and generates three times more employment.
We are facing a "unique opportunity", he insisted, to undertake the necessary adaptation of agricultural production to climate change. The financing from the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan, the funds from the Strategic Project for Economic Recovery and Transformation (PERTE), the contributions through the plans with the State Society of Agricultural Infrastructure (SEIASA), as well as the contributions of the State will generate this unprecedented public-private investment of 2,137 million euros in six years.
In Castilla y León, the minister said, the sum of these items will amount to 298.8 million euros. This Autonomous Community is, therefore, the main beneficiary of the investment in the modernization of irrigation until 2027, with a total of 19 actions of the 130 planned throughout the national territory.