The Popular Party in the City Council of San Bartolomé has presented a motion to the municipal Plenary for the creation of the Interpretation Center of the Sweet Potato Crop. The proposal of the popular also includes other measures such as promoting with the representatives of the sector the designation of origin "Lanzarote Sweet Potato", the development of a plan of aid to the sector for its commercialization and promotion, as well as promoting the ecological and quality cultivation of the sweet potato.
In the argumentation of the motion, the councilor of the PP, Francisco Cabrera, refers to the document prepared by the agricultural engineer Marta Peña Hernández, entitled "Brief approach to the agricultural systems of Lanzarote". In the opinion of the Popular Party of San Bartolomé, it describes "to perfection how the economic vicissitudes of the Archipelago made Lanzarote a strongly agricultural island".
As Marta Peña Hernández points out in her document, if the competent institutions do not act adequately in the areas of preservation and patrimonial dissemination and in the educational field, "irremediably, it is only a matter of time, that within a few years they will be erased from our memory and from the landscape, taking with them a very important part of our history, that which reminds us of what we once were".
Element of ethnographic heritage
In this sense, the popular also consider that, in addition to other measures such as the processing of the Designation of Origin "Lanzarote Sweet Potato", the corresponding files should be promoted to, where appropriate, declare this crop as an element of ethnographic and agro-cultural heritage, in collaboration with the areas of Heritage, Education and Primary Sector of the Cabildo of Lanzarote.
In the motion, the Popular Party proposes to the plenary to urge the Island Council of Lanzarote to, among the island areas mentioned, promote the creation of an Interpretation Center of the Sweet Potato Crop in the municipality of San Bartolomé. For Cabrera, the center should have a program of school activities, with didactic units for the development of workshops for the dissemination of the "sweet potato of Lanzarote", its cultivation and its uses in the schools of the island.
"The future Interpretation Center of the Sweet Potato Crop of San Bartolomé should put into practice other initiatives of administrative character of support to the ecological cultivation of quality of the sweet potato; aid to the sector; promotion; commercialization; promotion of its consumption, as well as gastronomic days with the use of the sweet potato of Lanzarote as a central product", defends Cabrera.
