Catalonia has accumulated 30 months of drought. There is a lack of water and the weather forecast is not good. It doesn't look like it's going to rain enough this spring. The irrigation campaign has started in Pla d'Urgell with half the water that will be needed, which has forced the imposition of 40% restrictions.
Farmers, consequently, plant winter cereals instead of corn and other spring and summer crops that require more water. This summer more than half of the agricultural area of this county in the great central depression will produce winter cereals. There will be no second crops, as usual, and legumes, vegetables and sweet fruit will be badly damaged.
Catalonia imports 60% of the food it consumes, and if the Plan d'Urgell does not reach the planned production, it will have to import even more.
Of the 40% that does produce, more than half (57.5%) comes from Lleida. However, the lack of water will reduce this production. The prices of legumes, vegetables, tubers, olives and sweet fruit will therefore continue to rise. They have already risen by 16.6%.
The situation is critical and pessimism prevailed in mid-March at the 150th edition of the agricultural fair of Sant Josep in Mollerussa, one of the most important in Europe.
Then it rained a lot in the spring. Now, however, the forecast is not good. Both Aemet and Meteocat anticipate that, in the best case, it will rain around the average, not above, as is necessary to recover the swamps.
The irrigation campaign began on March 20 in the auxiliary channel of Urgell, which collects water from the Noguera Pallaresa river, and on March 27, in the main channel, which is fed by the Segre.
An irrigation campaign in Pla d'Urgell consumes 660 hm3, and this starts with only 345 hm3. However, 345 hm3 is a lot of water. No one manages so much in Catalonia. The Ter-Llobregat system, for example, which provides drinking water to almost six million people, including the entire metropolitan area of Barcelona, with its corresponding industries, has an annual supply of 250 hm3.
By mid-March, most of them had already gone. The thaw has advanced two months. Today it is as if we were in the middle of May, with just 100 hm3 of water in the form of snow.
That it doesn't rain is nothing new. Droughts are cyclical, and if they are more noticeable now, it is largely because water consumption has increased. Joaquim Bellvert, researcher at the Institut de Recerca i Tecnologia Agroalimentària de Catalunya (IRTA), explained at the last R reg i futur conference, held in Mollerussa, that in 2022 water needs will increase by 14%, it is that is, 83 hm3. They are equivalent to the capacity of the Oliana marsh, one of the four that regulate the water that descends from the Pyrenees to the lands irrigated by the Urgell canals. They are about 70,000 hectares, which is equivalent to 76% of Catalonia's irrigated land.
For at least 20 years, the Generalitat has been dealing with the problem of lack of water. Bellvert has retrieved a study by the Generalitat from 2002 in which it was already assured that the climate crisis would eat up 20% of Catalonia's water resources.
The geographer Ignasi Aldomà, one of the great experts in agriculture and water management in Catalonia, considers that "Catalonia's strategic operation is to guarantee water to the entire coast", something that has not been done.
The passage of time and studies confirm the drought scenario affecting Catalonia, which forces water consumption to be halved in the coastal area, where the bulk of the population lives. Ter-Llobregat system reserves are at 27%.
The Urgell canals could use less water, but this hydraulic work, the most important in Europe in the 19th century, has barely been modernized since it came into operation in 1862. 81% of the plots still they are irrigated as blankets, that is, by flooding, despite the fact that the effectiveness of this type of irrigation is only 60%.
Xavier Díaz, general director of the General Community of Irrigators of the Canals d'Urgell, presented at the last Irrigation and Future conference a modernization plan that will replace blanket irrigation with sprinklers and drip irrigation, which are more effective than a 90% When the work is completed, if not already, a decade from now and at a cost of 1.42 billion euros, it will be possible to save nearly 200 hm3 in each irrigation campaign, almost a third of what is used now .
The modernization of the Urgell was considered decades ago, but the Administration preferred to expand the irrigation area by building another canal, the Segarra-Garrigues, a project that cost around 2,000 million euros, almost double what it had been budgeted for in 2003. In addition, it is not planned to irrigate the 70,000 hectares allocated to it until 2030.
Water for agricultural use in the Urgell canals ranges between 0.01 and 0.03 euros per hectare, a price which, on the low end, will double after the modernization.
This forces farmers to plant more value-added products such as persimmons, pomegranates, kiwis and pistachios. Smaller and less resourceful owners who cannot cope with this crop change will find it harder to make a living.
Aldomà warns that the irrigable land is very divided and that the owners have it very scattered. Concentration, as seen in Segarra-Garrigues, is very complex. "It is almost impossible to consolidate larger and homogeneous estates", he says.
Aldomà proposes "alternative systems of plot concentration to reduce the initial cost and the operating cost that modernization will entail". The aim is to preserve the current ownership of the land because the more owners there are, the more social cohesion there will be.
A plot concentration for the benefit of large companies will ruin the social fabric of the Urgell irrigated area. These companies will be able to irrigate the 70,000 hectares with 450 pivots, each about 400 meters long. Pivots are tubular structures on wheels for sprinkler irrigation.
The incentives of the Administration, so far, have not been enough to convince farmers without many years ahead of them or descendants who want to work in the fields.
"Many irrigators - admits Aldomà - are not interested in it. The intervention of the public sector is necessary and, moreover, everyone must be involved, bearing in mind that agriculture only uses 8.7% of the workforce in Pla d'Urgell".
Aldomà sees an alliance with cooperatives and local associations, and also with environmental groups, as essential. "The modernization of Urgell - he concludes - is the last chance we have to maintain the DNA of the current irrigation community".
