In the primary sector, there are those who say: "it would be best to run a bulldozer over it and build it again." And they are not entirely wrong given the state of many of the buildings in their structures, walls, and roofs.
There are also those who ask: is the soil suitable for establishing agricultural-livestock processing industries? Some even suspect the possible existence of debts that would make any action that is intended to be carried out unfeasible.
Finally, others, among whom we are, consider the complex worthy of an opportunity in order to achieve the purpose for which it was designed: "to support and develop the island's primary sector." These were beautiful words spoken with great fanfare at its inauguration in the early nineties, although unfortunately they were soon forgotten.
The reality is that today we are witnessing a continuous abandonment of cultivated land throughout the island, where only vines are barely maintained. But the rest of the crops such as potatoes, onions, and legumes are gradually disappearing, as less is planted each year. To give an example: in the last campaign, barely 200,000 kilos of onions were harvested (if that was reached), when in the immediate past, millions of kilos were collected in any year.
We will have to do something if we want to reverse this situation and aspire to increase our level of food self-sufficiency, especially when we are more obliged by the fact of living on an island. All of this necessarily involves a greater involvement of the different public administrations with farmers and ranchers, through the transfer of adequate infrastructure for the development of their activities. In this sense, we consider the recovery of the agro-industrial complex to be of vital importance.
In order to achieve this objective, it would be convenient to establish a commission composed of: technicians from the Cabildo (the only island administration with the capacity to launch it), technicians from the Teguise City Council (owner of almost all the buildings) and representatives of farmers' and ranchers' associations (true connoisseurs of the sector's needs). The work of this commission would be aimed at clearing up doubts about the qualification of the land, the ownership of the cold storage chambers and other industrial equipment. Finally, a project would be drafted to rehabilitate and
modernize the facilities to make them available to the island's agriculture.
The dilemma is as follows:
-We get to work in the search for a viability to the complex (even if it is building it again), since no one from outside is going to come to do it for us. We have all always thought that the idea of putting it into operation was a great success. So, why don't we fight to make it a reality? We all also agree that its management has been misguided. This would require, in order to reopen it, to manage it under absolutely professional criteria and far from all political affiliations.
-Or, on the contrary, we let the years continue to pass without doing anything, and thus the future inhabitants of the island will ask themselves: "What do we do with the Teguise agro-industrial complex?"
