BarcelonaThe situation in the Catalan countryside is critical. Farmers have been taking to the streets for weeks to demand improvements in the sector. This Wednesday they filled Madrid with tractors and plan to do the same on the border with France. The reason for their indignation is the restrictions due to the lack of water and climate change, which seriously affect their crops and herds. Parliament is debating this issue in a monographic plenary session this Thursday. But what do the deputies who are also farmers think? There are two of them, with proven experience in the sector and in politics, who combine the seat with the land and a mayor’s office. It is about the socialist Joaquim Paladella and the joiner Salvador Vergés. How is your day to day? How have they experienced the protests in the countryside?
Joaquim Paladella: “I’m spending everything I have on the farm”
Joaquim Paladella is the oldest peasant deputy. He was already a representative in Parliament during the tripartite legislatures and now he is again, always at the same time as mayor of Batea (Terra Alta), a position he has held since 1991. In his town, he cultivates sixty hectares of vines, most of dry The farm is organic and has 130,000 strains of varieties such as Garnacha – white and black – or Macabeu. Since he is busy as an MP, his son carries the brunt of the work, with the help of his wife and a full-time contract worker. “I am investing all my savings in the farm, which I want to leave to my son […]. I see that what has fed the family is in danger, the farmers feel it as ours, I was born there, not the I can leave for nothing in the world,” explains Paladella. The lack of rain has meant that his son had to ask for a loan of 50,000 euros to bring water to the vines and prevent them from dying. “We suffer the risk because it doesn’t rain, because of the bureaucracy, the competition from other wines from all over the world and everything makes it difficult.”
The representative of Terra Alta, who was a trade union delegate of the Union of Farmers, has actively participated in the mobilizations in the countryside: “I went to demonstrations in Móra la Nova and Móra d’Ebre and it was a pride to receive the farmers in the Parliament. We have to make agriculture go forward, we are experiencing a revolution,” he says. He also suffers from the problem of prices, since grapes are a product that has not evolved. He sells the grapes to the Viticultors Bateans cooperative, with thirty partners, where they make wine in bulk and bottle it under the Manyol brand and supply it to wineries in the Denomination of Origin (D.O.) Terra Alta area, but also D.O. Catalonia Still, he acknowledges the difficulty he faces: “Because the price is frozen, you have to get into a cycle of producing more that seems to have no end […] you need to set a real reference price, otherwise the buyer has the upper hand,” he says.
Salvador Vergés: “I am part of the problem, but so is the councilor”
Salvador Vergés is a bridge and road engineer who changed his course with the crisis of 2008, when he opted for professional training and to join as a young farmer. Although he also comes from a peasant family, he entered the farm of his wife’s family, of which he is currently an agri-food entrepreneur. He worked for several years as a cattle farmer at Mas la Carrera, in Sant Esteve d’en Bas (La Garrotxa), and it is, in fact, the place where he lives, but now he devotes himself fully to the Parliament, “traveling around farms and farms ” more than 60,000 kilometers per year. Theirs is a family business of grazing and fattening cattle, they have had a total of a thousand head of cattle, although they now have about half, after the retirement of their father-in-law. For years he introduced the Angus breed and they produce steaks, steaks and hamburgers. On the farm, they have corn, which is for the cattle and the forest, for grazing.
In the mobilizations, in which he spoke with numerous farmers and coordinated the reception at the Parliament, he always said one thing: “I come knowing that I am part of the problem, that if necessary you will blow the whistle on me because I am no stranger to it, and I should have done something badly, […] but so does the councillor,” he says. He has traveled and captured the discontent of the farmers and believes that with the protests the conditions have been created to achieve improvements. For this reason, he is excited to reach an agreement in the monographic plenary on the drought.
Contradictions Barcelona-rural world
One of the challenges facing peasant deputies is the cosmopolitan vision. Although they note that PSC and Junts, respectively, perfectly understand the peasantry, they perceive in the Catalan chamber the rural-urban clash: “It is a constant struggle, the vision of Barcelona is totally different and it generates problems of bureaucracy, with policies with good intention, but which harm the farmer”, assures Paladella. “I find myself with an urbanite and clientelistic mentality, this costs money, and it is true that the motions in Parliament on farming are not the most numerous,” complains Vergés.