Francesc Boya (Lés, Val d'Aran, 1960) is the herald of rural Spain in the Government, from the general secretariat for the Demographic Challenge, a department that has the responsibility of generating and supervising transversal policies that facilitate territorial rebalancing. Boya, founder of the Unity of Aran party integrated into the PSC since the mid-1990s, was the trustee of Arán between 2007 and 2011, and again between 2019 and 2020, and has been a deputy in the Parliament of Catalonia and a councilor in Lés. Known as Paco Boya, he is also a writer, one of the most prominent in Aranese Occitan.
I have to ask you about the definition of your department. What is “demographic challenge”? In other words, what specifically is the challenge: reverse the exodus, develop the territories...?
It is the expression that illustrates a problem with different roots and that is evidenced in demography as a decapitalization of the territories from the point of view of population density, but not only in numerical terms but also in imbalances of opportunities, of ages, of gender. But in reality what we are talking about is territorial cohesion, social cohesion and the democratic challenge. Because we talk about the necessary equality of rights and opportunities and how to implement it in territories that are unable to provide these opportunities to counteract a population exodus of significant dimensions.
How does the dialectic work between demographic challenge and ecological transition, which are united in the ministerial portfolio? Because there are those who live in conflict between the rights of the territories and the accelerated needs of energy transition.
We are walking a path of tensions, between the cities and the rural world. But it is important that, if we talk about the difficulties of rurality, we must also talk about the difficulties of agglomeration. When we talk about environmental sustainability, it is also important to consider the concept of territorial functionality. They are elements that must be combined. And we are also talking about competitiveness and economic opportunity, which is also in tension. And in these tensions, a passable path must be found that brings together the best of each area. In this sense, the fact that the demographic challenge is in the field of ecological transition has a very deep message that appeals to how we want to inhabit our country, how we want to inhabit the planet. This has to do with ecological transition and how the economy of the agglomeration is consuming a lot of resources on the planet, cities consume 75% of the resources. We must look for other ways of living and that implies recovering a new functionality of the rural territory as a space where these externalities of the cities can really be mitigated.
The ecological transition was already urgent, but it has been accelerated by the requirements of the recovery funds and by the objective of reducing energy dependence in the framework of the war. A perfect storm that threatens to crush the rural environment under forests of windmills and solar farms.
It is true that there is an urgency. Climate change is drowning us, so to speak, we have a problem and we know scientifically how to combat it. It is clear that changing the energy model implies tensions, which are reasonable, and in which everyone has their share of reason. The rural world does not want to be a granary territory, and it is absolutely right, and at the same time the Government has to fulfill the responsibility of making this change possible. I think this is understood, but understanding it does not mean that it releases all tensions. But it has been understood that the fact that a territory is going to receive the impact of renewables has to guarantee that this territory has to be a territory of opportunity, and that has been transferred to the regulatory framework. So that the companies that have renewable energy in a specific territory and that have to access a connection node are going to have, and this is made explicit by the royal decree that will see the light of day in a very short time, that guarantee the return that this activity economy has in that territory. For the best socioeconomic status it represents. And for the promotion of this self-consumption energy and the local energy communities, which must enjoy a plus of connectivity so that they can be viable. We must seek this balance and the ministry is adapting these regulatory frameworks so that it is not only an economic opportunity, which is fine, but so that people in the field can experience it as an opportunity to have accessible energy and retain talent.
A constant complaint from these territories and from the organizations of España Vaciada is that they continue to suspend train services that provide the backbone of counties and give meaning to the territory. How are these inertias combated? Does this secretariat have to fight with all the ministries?
What this Secretary of State has to do is a lot of pedagogy. But neither do we have bank books on how to recover the rural territory, and the demographic and functional problems of the territories. And in Europe there are no examples of characteristics similar to ours. It is interesting in this to understand how we have built a governance in this sense. In the case of trains, administrations try to be efficient, ensure the proper use of public money, and they must do so, but this sometimes collides with elements such as mobility, transport, with the existence of trains that are very deficit but that are fulfilling a role of public service. In our new governance model we have created a rural mobility table with the autonomous communities that acts as a filter and allows us to do something that the administrations did not do. So that, for example, faced with an inefficient train in terms of passengers, we can study what alternatives there are. And that money that an administration deals with how the money saved by suspending a less efficient train can be reinvested in other mobility that is more intelligent and more adaptable to the reality of those territories. It is no longer a question of saying I close an inefficient train and get rid of the problem, but rather we take charge, and we are generating a catalog of good practices and a diagnosis of the different territories to see where we have these vulnerability problems, in, for example, territories very remote, not connected to the major mobility axes. In this sense, this exercise will be very interesting and will give us another look at rural mobility.
The people of rural Spain see the schools, the stops, the barracks, the administration offices close and perceive that the State is leaving. This march creates a feeling of abandonment.
There is a part of reason in this argument, the evidence of what is happening cannot be denied, but this is also due to the political evolution of the country and the distribution of competence frameworks. And it is true that until now the State had not had a vision of what territorial and social cohesion meant, and therefore there were no specific policies to combat this situation. What we must do now is begin to understand that the State is not something abstract, that it is in an indefinite place within the M30, but that it is a whole series of institutions that have to be on an equal footing with the territories. That is why I defend that we must empower local administrations, and we must work side by side with the Autonomous Communities, and we are doing it. Because returning functionality to the territories and improving the demographic challenge of these territories will only be achieved if we are capable of articulating a multilevel policy in which the role of the State is very important, yes, but the leadership of the mayor and the tools that you have in that town to be able to reverse that situation. At a time when digitization is opening up enormous possibilities for us, we must ensure that the State is once again present in these territories, and at the same time, the State and the Autonomous Communities articulate leveraging policies so that this local community has the possibility of changing the horizon of future of the municipality. That is the way to recover those spaces, in addition to some initiatives such as the deconcentration process of state centers, which have gone to Soria, Cuenca, Talavera de la Reina, Zamora... This deconcentration process is the clearest way to illustrate that we started to understand the State in another way and not in the radial way that has been understood for many decades.
Will the demographic challenge one day be a policy that informs all the others, as is already the case with gender policies?
I think so. These models are also going to arrive because of how heterogeneous the territories are and all the policies that affect those territories have to be filtered by that perspective, but at the same time they have to be adaptive. In other words, they have to collect those singularities of the application of the law in the different territories because certain criteria that work in the south do not work in the south.
It was seen with the pandemic, for example, with the policies of social distance and life outdoors, which made no sense in rural areas.
That's it. I think there is something important that has happened in these years, because we have been talking about the phenomenon of depopulation for a relatively short time. It has been five or six years since it entered the political agenda. And there was a long journey of many people who were in the associative world working on this issue, because it is true that we had been fighting with this issue of how more than 70% of the territory was being disarmed, that it was left empty. But now rurality has won the story, no one questions that the rural environment is fundamental, no one dares to say that it is an anachronistic space. But after winning the story, now we have to win the battle of the facts, the battle of the realities. That is what we have to build in areas that are transversal, because it affects everything, social affairs, public policies, the economy, which we can only achieve with long-term policies, different governments will have to succeed one another, maintaining structures that deal with and care about this. In this sense, having a secretariat for the demographic challenge responds to this sensitivity, and the fact that many communities have commissioners, general directorates, secretariats, and have already developed policies in this regard, means that we are on the right track.
Teleworking and the pandemic have caused a certain rediscovery of the rural world even as a workplace. In this challenge, the deployment of connectivity weighs heavily. Is there such a return or has it been testimonial?
There is a bit of both. At first, the pandemic has helped many people not leave the towns first. Secondly, there have been people who have returned to these towns because they could telework and many have stayed. It's true. But it is also true that at this time, taking advantage of this enormous opportunity that supposes that for the first time in history that work is not linked to a physical space, requires building a framework, which is being done with the law of teleworking, but the labor law is not enough. All those jobs, estimated at 40% that could go to rural areas or to medium-sized cities, logically want certain living conditions. And they can find that in medium-sized cities, but if we go to rural areas it is more difficult. The other day I was in Asturias, in Asiegu, where there was a biomedical engineer from North Carolina, married to a guy from London, and they are living there with a fantastic life connection leading the life of their dreams, because their passion is climbing . But it is true that Asiegu is an exemplary town, in this sense, with 70 inhabitants and 12 children, but it shows that not all towns are doomed.
It is not a normal ratio.
No, but when you understand what has happened in Asiegu you also understand that there is that answer. We must build this new scenario and for that we need to review the territorial functionality, because that is the great key. The territories must have the capacity to provide services to their inhabitants, and this capacity implies a robust public policy that is at the service of the rights of those citizens who cannot be forgotten for reasons of cost. You have to see the investment and you have to see the new possibilities of digitization to provide services and that capacity of the territories to be attractive for profiles like these. And this concerns talent, because where that young talent returns or stays, we have already won a very important part of the battle.
Writer Dioni López says that “it doesn't matter what the question is, the answer is always tourism”. In rural areas it has been like this for a long time. But now we value other scenarios, such as endogenous values and that activity that can be installed there, which at the same time has risks, as we have seen with the debate on macro farms.
In the question there is a part of the answer, by mentioning the endogenous values. There is an issue that is fundamental and that we are working on in this project of the 21st century villages, and that is the concept of community. A town is not a group of houses, it is a way of living that is different and opposed to the city. Individualism weighs heavily in the city and in the town what prevails is the feeling of community, of doing things together, of improving the future that we share in a relatively small space. From this point of view, tourism is an opportunity and it has been, because it quickly generates employment and wealth, but we also know that this is not enough if we want to generate diversified and resilient economies, we have to look for alternatives. One of the problems in tourist areas is that families who have had hotel and restaurant businesses have been able to educate their children in universities far away, spending a lot of money, but those children have not been able to return because there was nothing to do if you were an engineer. For example, it was very difficult to find lace. What we have to do and are doing is generate a kind of territorial intelligence, using innovation as a lever and generating territorial innovation centers that want to be nothing more than landing strips and the generation of ecosystems in which that talent finds ways to return to that rural space and develop their profession by teleworking or undertake projects that are more complex than tourism or agri-food projects. And in this sense, digitization allows us to go further. Asturias has a great example in Peón with the CTIC. It is still very incipient, but retaining intelligence in the territories is essential. And retention can only be done if we are capable of generating a symbiosis between local institutions, companies that need a living rural environment, and at the same time the participation of the State to generate these synergies with universities, local actors, and public policies and achieve that young people once again feel interested in the rural environment. Now in June we will launch the Rural Campus project, so that 300 students can do their final degree or master's degree study in a rural area.
Like a rural Erasmus.
As a rural Erasmus at the level of the entire state and in addition to generating knowledge and contributing science to these companies, cooperatives and municipalities, we are sure that it will generate that affection, this reunion between young people and rural areas.
We are talking about processes similar to those provided by the new wine culture, with the modernization of processes, the incorporation of agronomists into crops, etc., which have transformed entire regions, beyond La Rioja or Ribera del Duero. In this transformation, the return of expert knowledge has had a great deal of weight.
It has to do with that and with the generation of a culture around wine. We have a very diverse territory, and there are some where wine has been an impressive driver of transformation, but there are many territories where these drivers are yet to be discovered, simply because no one has thought about their potential. Therefore, this alliance between the public and the private and these shared spaces are a key element to generate this territorial intelligence that must be networked and encompass all territories. And this must be done from the bottom up, it is not worth someone arriving with a parachute and setting up a factory or an industry for you, because we already know that these models are extremely fragile. Instead, it is about building something that works from the bottom up, in whatever dimension, that we do not need all places to be a pole of industrial development, but that these enclaves can gradually fit those pieces that allow it to draw a horizon of future where its potentialities, be it agri-food, be it energy production, be it the conservation of a natural space for the enjoyment of others (and that is where extensive livestock farming and a series of other elements come into play...) how to do it well to develop the activity, in general excellence and become a benchmark. It is what in Europe is called territorial intelligence and it is what this secretariat tries to deploy.
All this, with the addition that at the moment the rural environment fears becoming the urban back room, not only in agri-food terms, and we were talking before about macro-farms to feed cities, but also with the generation of energy or the new sword of Damocles of the rural: the new mining exploitations of materials on which we now have a great dependence outside the EU.
This is what we were talking about before regarding the debate on how we want to live and how we ensure that this passage through life does not involve destroying the environment, that we are sustainable and consistent so that those who come have a space to inhabit. This has to do with the new sovereignties, energy, food, it has to do with the circular economy, with the empowerment of citizens regarding these issues, with participation, and with a new concept of democracy. All this sometimes forces us to do exercises such as "retro-progression", as an Asturian friend says. The cities, until the railway arrived, had the peri-urban orchards and the barn and the pantry around the city. Food could not travel thousands and thousands of kilometers as we have seen in this period of exacerbated globalization in which it seemed that what was next, what did not cross oceans, had no value. Now there are some new values that point us to another way of building those territories, those habitable spaces in which we can not only think of uncompromising competitiveness, in which the territories were winners or losers based on that competitiveness. Now we know that in that model, the rural was always a losing space. But it is that now the cities, which is true that due to the economy of the agglomeration they are competitive territories, they begin to have many problems and externalities that have to do precisely with sustainability but I would say that also with the happiness of their inhabitants. Conceiving the economy, not as the economy of the agglomeration but as an economy redistributed in the territory, is going to allow us to make a qualitative leap from the point of view of discovering that we are going to have possibilities of generating employment and quality of life and being more sustainable if cities apply the concept of agropolitanism, that is, if they are agropolitan cities that manage their food, that have a dialogue with rural areas that provide them with renewable energy and therefore compensate for the effort made by rurality by maintaining ecosystem services. This dialogue is very necessary but it is also very incipient, although there are those who are already putting it into practice, and it is the essential exercise for these coming years.
