Unemployment rates above 35%. The shopping basket much more expensive than the average in the Spanish state. Water tremendously expensive due to the cost of overcoming our own orography. But, nevertheless, the Canary Islands continues to mean a great business for Madrid.
While the Government of the Balearic Islands and the Valencian Community openly reject gas and oil, arguing that "oil and the tourism industry are incompatible" according to the PP politicians who head those governments, in the Canary Islands the Minister of Industry of the same party of the Spanish right, finds incontestable the fact that oil can be extracted in waters near the archipelago.
It is not only the fragility of the Canary economy, with 80% of the active population dedicated to the service sector, based on the tourism we receive, which would be seriously damaged in the event of an ecological disaster. If it is not that, in addition, at least two thirds of the archipelago's consumption water is taken from the sea, through desalination plants, and we are not in a position to play with such a precious asset.
There are currently more than 300 desalination plants in the archipelago, which supply Fuerteventura and Lanzarote with 100% of the consumption water, both in terms of urban human consumption and peasant consumption, and in the entire archipelago they reach 67%.
The electricity consumption of desalination is very high, so the original forecast was that these would cover their consumption through the production of alternative energies, in which there was clear progress in the Canary Islands, until Soria's "energy reform", which has taxed the alternatives to the point of making them unacceptable in terms of profitability.
In Madrid they now play to control the water, through essential subsidies for the maintenance of desalination plants, in what is a Spanish colonialist practice that controls every drop of consumption water in the archipelago, while we are denied the energy sovereignty that is fair for any territory.
Meanwhile, tourism continues to grow year after year: although this does not translate into job creation, because employers sacrificed quality to the exploitation allowed by the new Spanish labor legislation. Life in the archipelago is becoming more and more difficult, more expensive, even for the majority that make up the cheap labor favored by the neoliberal and capitalist policies of the colonialist state and the local bourgeoisie.
And now, a new threat to consumers of desalinated water and therefore to the inhabitants of the archipelago: the possibility of contamination of our seas, of the raw material used by desalination plants and of 80% of the jobs that remain in the Canary Islands. We will drink oil...
This is Soria's Spain: this is how the Canary Islands are. This is how we tell it.
Pedro González Cánovas
Member of the Canarian Nationalist Alternative
