It's hard to believe, but a young farmer in the municipality has been waiting for four years - already with total resignation - for Canal Gestión to grant him a meter to water his farm with desalinated water. We do not know the exact number of similar requests that are accumulated in the files of the supplying company. It is said that there are more than a hundred pending applications.
Some may ask: How is it possible that after all this time the placement of a meter has not been authorized? Although the correct question would be: How long until we see this young man give up his intention to dedicate himself to agriculture? Unfortunately, it will not be necessary for much time to pass to see him abandon it, since he has been cultivating his sandy soil "with great difficulty", since in recent years it has rained very little, which is forcing him to continuously transport water in tanks, with an unaffordable economic cost, to try to save his crops.
Obviously, with these precedents we cannot aspire to have a generational change in the primary sector, and even less if public administrations do not decisively support young people who are committed to agricultural activity. A sample of the neglect is the little attention paid by certain public officials, who to each request about the water problem answer: "that it is not their responsibility", and refer farmers to talk to the Consortium or to formulate the corresponding protest before Canal Gestión.
People in the countryside do not want to hear justifications, they ask for solutions.
The reasons given by the concessionaire company to deny new meters range (in a cut and paste that is repeated in all the answers) from the lack of a network, to the lack of flow to the preference of urban consumption over agricultural. This last allegation would have its reason for being in another scenario, where the entire tourist accommodation plant was at full occupancy, but this argument cannot be admitted at the present time with hotels and apartment complexes closed.
In the past, INALSA was successfully launched for the Islands of Lanzarote and La Graciosa, a pioneering entity in the Canary Islands, which was a model in purifying water for domestic consumption and even bottled it with acceptable quality. However, political management (or rather the disastrous intervention of someone) led it to ruin, subjecting the entire population to continuous water cuts.
The creditors' meeting of Inalsa will be forever etched in our collective memory as an example of failure, because we were not able to manage a public company that had not only the monopoly of water, but also had the appropriate personal, material and technical means to be managed correctly.
Later, Canal de Isabel II arrived from Madrid with its subsidiary Canal Gestión Lanzarote, to which the integral water cycle was granted after offering more than one hundred million euros that would be destined: on the one hand, to pay off the debts of INALSA; and on the other, to face the necessary investments to improve the supply network.
In the beginning, it is true and it must be recognized, Canal Gestión considerably improved the supply of urban consumption; however, the same has not happened with agriculture, which has seen its situation worsen over the years as it has been subjected to continuous cuts, as well as a reduction in the frequency of irrigation days, which in many areas has been limited to a single day a week. Also, farmers have been denouncing for some time the high levels of salinity of the water that is irreparably impoverishing our soils. The loss of agricultural land is a very serious problem that must be given preferential attention if we want to aspire to have sustainable development, especially when we inhabit a territory declared a "Biosphere Reserve".
Today Canal Gestión is complaining, without taking measures to avoid it, about the losses it suffers due to failures in the network to justify the poor quality of the service. On the other hand, we find Canal de Isabel II splashed with cases of corruption not only in Spain but also in several South American countries; in addition, Canal Gestión has been put up for sale through an assignment made to Banco Santander de Negocios; that is, we are facing a parent company in clear retreat and with a subsidiary on which an uncertain future is projected, so water once again presents a not very hopeful panorama in these parts.
For all this, we believe that the time has come for the current political leaders to assume the need to recover the management of water, either through the rescue of the service or the termination of the concession contract. We cannot continue to endure a deficient service, nor can the countryside wait since it is urgent to irrigate the crops to alleviate the effects of the drought suffered as a consequence of the absence of rains in recent winters that will cause, if the regular supply of water is not remedied promptly, the abandonment of more cultivated land.
The course of history now offers us a new opportunity (to recover the management of water) that we must know how to take advantage of to compensate ourselves as a society for the blunders of the past.
Signed. Island Council of Lanzarote of PALCA-LA UNIÓN
