The Local Committee of Coalición Canaria in Haría demands that the Cabildo of Lanzarote that the Interpretation and Transformation Center of the Cochinilla, located in the northern town of Mala, “be opened immediately”, as part of the solution to the problems suffered by farmers working in this sector.
“Our primary sector is being hit hard and, within it, the cochineal sector is especially suffering the consequences derived not only from the commercial crisis of this product but from the closure of the Interpretation and Transformation Center”, explained the local secretary, Víctor Robayna.
CC states that the closure of said Center, since the beginning of the pandemic, “has ruined the hopes of giving an outlet to this product, further punishing a sector that has suffered for years the abandonment of a landscape as peculiar as that of the prickly pear field of Guatiza and Mala, from which they feed”.
The northern nationalists also recall that cochineal has been for more than 15 years “without a market that facilitates its exit to an export that alleviates the situation of the collecting farmers, who have an estimate of 50,000 kilos stored and without any confidence in being able to put them on the market”.
From Coalición Canaria they point out that the only hopes for the sector were focused on the Interpretation and Transformation Center of La Cochinilla, “which was tendered in 2014 for a period of ten years”, and that they emphasize that among its functions “was to elaborate carmine from the cochineal Dactylopiidae coccus”.
“For this purpose, the awarded company, was committed to the acquisition of several kilos of cochineal from local producers, as well as investing in the improvements of the farms and maintaining the landscape of Guatiza and Mala, but before the closure, everything is desolation”, adds Robayna.
To this accumulation of misfortunes, according to CC Haría, has recently joined “a plague of Mexican cochineal “Dactylopius opuntiae” that is devastating the prickly pear farms, without any measures being taken to stop this disaster at the moment”.
That is why the nationalists also ask the first institution, “to create a specific Employment Plan that helps to alleviate the bleeding situation experienced by this unique and characteristic landscape of Lanzarote that is threatened by this plague”, emphasizes the local secretary of CC, Víctor Robayna.