Published
Video duration:
18 mins
In Andalusia, the immense wetland of the Doñana National Park is dying, causing fauna and flora to disappear. The main cause is the capture of river water by irrigation canals, 80% of which are used for agriculture. Between farmers and environmentalists, the water war has begun.
The landscape is blackened and dried out. Javier, former director of the biology station of the Doñana National Park, remembers the past splendor of this “paradise for naturalists“, an immense area of marsh which is dying today. The cause is the capture of river water by irrigation canals, 80% of which is used for agriculture, mainly in greenhouses. Unesco has threatened to place the Doñana on the list of world heritage in danger.
In 2014, the Andalusian Parliament banned a number of operations, but clandestine wells were dug. According to environmental associations, around a thousand wells of this type draw water directly from under the Doñana Park, contributing to its drying up, and clearly, the police’s efforts to close these clandestine wells are not all successful.
How to reconcile economic activity and respect for the environment?
However, some farms are completely legal, like that of Julio, spokesperson for the group of Huelva farmers, who grows blueberries. For him, farmers do “good use of water“to feed European populations, and the problem comes from “the ideological intoxication of environmentalists”Who “distill harmful ideas”.
How to reconcile economic activity and respect for the environment? This water war has rocked Andalusia politically: the right, which promised to reopen new farms, has won the last three elections in this historic bastion of the Spanish left for forty years.
A report by Loïc de La Mornais, Rémy Bonnefoy, Fabrice Fuzillier, Katia Pinzon, Emmanuel Lejeune broadcast in “Special Envoy” on September 14, 2023.
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