The Urgell and Segarra-Garrigues canals propose merging and thus taking advantage of infrastructure resources to save and improve irrigation modernization.
It was explained by the presidents of both irrigation communities, Amadeu Ros and Josep Maria Jové, at the assembly of the Association of Irrigation Communities of Catalonia, in Lleida.
Ros has stressed that the only condition is that they can begin the modernization of 11,500 hectares of Urgell before the end of the year.
Jové has said that Segarra-Garrigues has been asking the Administration for this merger for more than 10 years so as not to have the channel "underused."
The Secretary of Rural Agenda, Oriol Ansón, has positively valued the proposal to harmonize these two channels.
Amadeu Ros has insisted that the irrigators of the Segarra-Garrigues canal are "neighbors and friends." "We all know each other and we are united" he added and gave as an example that in Les Garrigues, there are many farms that need irrigation support from Urgell and they do so with technical irrigation.
According to Ros, if the 11,500 hectares planned for modernization are added to the 10,000 they already have, a lot of water could be "released" that could be passed on to neighbors or even make more contributions to the Delta. The modernization of the 70,000 hectares of the Urgell canal could reduce by half the demand for 600 hectometers per year that are used for irrigation of this infrastructure.
The president of the Segarra-Garrigues canal, Amadeu Ros, has assured that they have been asking the Administration for more than 10 years to be able to use the facilities of this channel for the Urgell canal. "We would save a lot of money," he said, since the Segarra-Garrigues passes at a level of 100 meters higher than the Urgell and that means that they would provide 10 kilos of pressure without the need to build any pressure pond or infrastructure.
Jové regretted that the Segarra-Garrigues infrastructures are "undervalued" and stressed that the merger would serve to reduce the cost of modernizing Urgell.
In this sense, Jové has assured that until now the Government has not had the will to carry out this project. It is one thing to merge two irrigation communities and another to merge the infrastructure, since the organization of both canals is different and merging them in an administrative sense "will be complicated", but in the area of facilities, "we believe not", he concluded. Jové stressed that "now is the time" in the current context of drought.
The Secretary of Rural Agenda, Oriol Ansón, has seen the proposal first-hand and has assured that he views it well because it would serve to carry out "much better management" of water throughout the area. In no case has he said that it would mean an interconnection of networks and he has recalled that with the management of the Segarra-Garrigues in the Government, there has been a lot of insistence that a project to transfer water from the Segre to another area of the country is not proposed, although of the canal, Aigües Ter-Llobregat (ATLL) takes charge.
The announcement of this merger proposal was made in the framework of the 11th Meeting of Irrigation Communities of the Catalan Association of Irrigation Communities (ACATCOR), of which Amadeu Ros is the vice-president.
The main issue that has been discussed is the serious drought that Catalonia is suffering, especially in the internal basins. In this sense, there have been complaints that irrigators from this part of the country cannot be represented on the board of the Catalan Water Agency (ACA).
