Recover and sell Valencian carob and truffle: a project to promote the emptied Spain

In the Valencian region of Canal de Navarrés, the melera variety of the carob tree is cultivated, located at the foot of the mountain and with "great environmental functions".

Thomas Osborne
Thomas Osborne
06 November 2022 Sunday 21:45
6 Reads
Recover and sell Valencian carob and truffle: a project to promote the emptied Spain

In the Valencian region of Canal de Navarrés, the melera variety of the carob tree is cultivated, located at the foot of the mountain and with "great environmental functions". But there are several abandoned fields, says Javier Martínez, a technician from the Association of Forest Municipalities of the Valencian Community (AMUFOR), which a project financed by the European Union will now try to recover by betting on the circular economy.

Del Bosque a Tu Casa is an initiative to promote the emptied Spain, which will open laboratories and workshops in five autonomous communities, including the Valencian Community, to obtain "tested and marketable" products from the non-timber natural resources of the forests. In Valencia, the focus has been on two products, the carob and the truffle, which are worked in Enguera and Andilla, respectively.

"Recovering these Andilla fields would mean generating forest continuity, which is why this project is going to focus on the Canal de Navarrés and the other on the Serranía de Valencia. We understand that there is a range of usable properties for various types of products," explains Javier Martinez, from AMUFOR.

This association is part of the consortium of the Commerce for Development Foundation (COPADE), as well as the Society of Ecological and Mountain Agriculture of the Valencian Community (SAEM), which manages the project that has approximately two million euros of financing European. Of these, a total of 144,261.28 euros are destined for the Valencian municipalities.

With this, both entities will implement this project that will also promote employment through the training of women in rural areas. "They are the priority, but hiring will not be exclusive," explains Martínez. They will be taught how to work with simplified product development processes to boost entrepreneurship and the economy in rural areas. "We hope that all the territories can take out about 30 items suitable for promotion with a logo or distinctive that groups them, whether in cosmetics, or in pharmaceutical or food lines," explains Martínez.

From COPADE, Marta Corella, coordinator of Del Bosque a Tu Casa and mayor of Orea (Guadalajara), stresses that "the cutting edge of the project is that part of the territory will return to the territory with small initiatives that will come together and take research and development to small uninhabited towns".

In addition to the Valencian Community, five other provinces from six different regions participate: Guadalajara and Albacete, Teruel, Soria and Córdoba.

"We want to create a model that can be replicated in other territories to offer new opportunities," details Corella, who points out that it is key to have the complicity of the city councils, "an important support because sometimes the land that will need to be worked on is public and they have the last word," he says.

Likewise, to develop this project, it will have the support of universities, such as the Polytechnic University of Valencia (UPV), and local organizations that will work directly in the territory. The idea is to generate local employment and promote female entrepreneurship at the end of the three years that the initiative is scheduled to last – which will initially start in January – but the idea is that it does not stay here. "If it works, it could be done in many other territories," explains Corella.