I am afraid for food sovereignty. If the farmers here do not continue, what will happen to the territory? Small towns of 300 inhabitants are holding on because there are farmers who live with their families.” This is what Gemma Llanes Sagarra says, a farmer from Ivars d'Urgell who runs Pomona Fruits with her husband, Xavier Viladot, a small company producing organic pears, apples, apricots and pears.
“Politicians keep talking about the demographic challenge, but supporting the countryside would mean fighting against that empty territory,” he argues. And he demands that the Administration control the quality of imported products “and demand the same standards as those here, both in organic and conventional production.”
In the long agrarian crisis that has put so many tractors on the roads, Gemma Llanes is convinced that “the fight is between family farming and agribusiness”, a situation in which, in addition to the European Union, from her point of view, the Generalitat and the State could make things easier for farmers, from public purchases to awareness campaigns about the benefits of local products.
He argues that the Administration buys fresh produce for hospitals or schools and that these tenders are always won by large agribusiness, “because they carry out super-complicated public tenders without differentiating the size of the company, not like what happens in France, where large companies have a bureaucracy. and the small ones, another.” He thinks that in these tenders the Catalan Administration could, for example, give extra points to local companies and small producers thinking about territorial balance.
He also believes that the Administration could collaborate in raising awareness among consumers so that they opt for local production or, sweeping for their home, for organic products.
“We sell some of our production in March in Germany and we do it so late because German companies prefer their pears first. When they finish them in March, rather than buying from South America they buy from us.”
Give another example. One year when he could not sell the apples, he called a couple of French companies offering them at cost price and they responded that at that time the purchases did not depend on the price: if there were French apples, they did not buy foreign apples.
“This awareness – he asserts – does not exist in Spain and the consumer has to know that in their act of purchase they are helping the territory.”
A few years ago she and her husband decided to convert their fruit farms from conventional to organic production. They began with regenerative agriculture, based on maintaining the biodiversity of the land with natural techniques, and over time they have made a firm commitment to biodynamic agriculture, which works with preparations obtained from medicinal plants, such as nettle broth or valerian preparation, and takes into account the cycles of the moon.
The margins of their farms are full of aromatic plants and beehives to facilitate pollination, with insect hotels for their non-stinging bees of the osmia variety. Precisely these days they work on placing canes for this type of bees on the farms, because the heat brings forward their birth each year.
Pomona Fruits' project to convert conventional to organic agriculture won the fourth edition of the BBVA Best Sustainable Producers awards in 2020. Four years later, Gemma Llanes is one of the twelve women who started the “Lleida land of transformative women” project, with which the Government Delegation promotes a shared agenda of rural women.
