Union of Unions has opted to put on hold the protests called off by the crisis in the agri-livestock sector until the new Executive is formed that comes out of the ballot boxes on 29 November, to which it will also grant a “small margin of trust” to evaluate its first decisions. “In principle the idea is to suspend until new Government,” he has asserted.
This decision was announced this Monday by the president of UCCL in Valladolid and a member of the National Executive of Union of Unions, Valentín García Fraile, at a press conference in which he defended delaying the mobilizations to avoid conditioning the electoral campaign that will kick off this Friday, 13 November.
“The problems continue, but it seems to us that this is not the moment to stage another demonstration when we are about to enter the electoral campaign and this is postponed,” explained the head of UCCL-Valladolid, who guaranteed that they will take up the protests “with renewed force” when there is a new Government, which they will demand address the serious situation the countryside is going through.
“Either action is taken or this could be the disappearance of many holdings,” Valentín García Fraile warned during the appearance convened by the Union of Farmers of Castilla y León, in which a document was presented with 13 priority areas and 100 specific commitments to ensure the viability and future of the agricultural sector and the rural environment, conceived as a “roadmap” aimed at political parties ahead of the general elections on 29 November.
Laura González, a member of the Autonomous Executive of UCCL, has warned that the Spanish countryside is going through “its worst moment” and reiterated that farmers and livestock breeders cannot keep producing at a loss or with prices that do not cover costs. To this she added unfair competition from imports, the “suffocating excess” of bureaucracy “and a CAP that often forgets who really works the land,” she added.
Among the lawsuits of UCCL in the livestock sector, a segment that, as the coordinator of the organization, Jesús Manuel González Palacín, has lamented, has "little importance" in electoral programs, the review of the concept of animal health is included. He has considered it "extremely urgent" to modify in depth the Royal Decree that regulates the eradication of tuberculosis, calling for a clear commitment to the vaccine, "a tool that is already being tested in other countries like the United Kingdom with very good results and that here neither is being used nor is it expected to be used".
He has also added the urgency of "drastically reducing the wolf population" and of indemnifying "in a rapid way and with sufficient amount" the farmers affected by the attacks. "We are living with more than 2,000 wolf specimens in Castilla y León with more than 5,000 attacks per year of those declared, because many of them are not even reported," González Palacín explained, who has urged replicating the control model that Norway applies.
In relation to the CAP 2028-2035, UCCL has demanded maintaining, at minimum, the 520,000 million in budget and the two-pillar structure, rejecting "outright" any attempt to renationalize agricultural policy, since, if that were to happen, "it would stop being common." Among its proposals are also strengthening the law on the food chain, ensuring compliance with the mirror clauses in international agreements, and simplifying CAP management.
"We call on political parties to assume these 100 commitments as a government mandate; we do not need either good words, which surely we will hear these days in all their rallies and speeches; we need solutions and we need them now, because the future, continuity, and the generational replacement of our farmers and livestock breeders, and therefore the future of the food for our families and for those of all of you, is at stake," Laura González concluded.