ARCHIVED - Pioneering Mar Menor protection legislation was passed 32 years ago but later scrapped

The interests of the tourism and agriculture sectors were prioritized over the environment

In the light of the current crisis regarding the marine environment in the Mar Menor there has been a great deal of public disagreement over who is to blame, with the regional government of Murcia, the Spanish government, Town Halls, the CHS water infrastructures administration body, crop farmers, town planners, the companies owning abandoned mines and many others all keen to attribute the responsibility to the others.

At the same time, though, all the above are also keen to stress the importance of working together to save the Mar Menor and looking forwards to the future rather than backwards to the past, among them Fernando López Miras, the president of the regional government. This resolve to cooperate rather than point the finger may be put to the test on Wednesday when Sr López (of the PP party) meets Teresa Ribera, the PSOE Minister for Ecological Transition before she visits the Mar Menor, but in the meantime it is still interesting to reflect on how legislation to protect the Mar Menor was first disregarded and then completely scrapped during the latter years of the 20^th century.

An article published in regional newspaper La Verdad on Wednesday traces the history of a law passed as long ago as 1987 by the PSOE regional government in Murcia which, at the time, was considered to be a pioneering piece of environmental legislation designed to leave the Mar Menor completely free of polluting substances within 5 years. The Ley de Protección del Mar Menor was published by the Official State Bulletin on 16^th July 1987, having been drawn up by the regional minister for Public Works, José Salvador Fuentes Zorita, who later became head of the CHS, and passed during the presidency of Carlos Collado Mena.

Among the stated aims were to reduce the runoff of harmful substances from agricultural and mining concerns in the Campo de Cartagena and the mountains of Sierra Minera.

However, due to the restrictions it placed on land use in the Campo de Cartagena it met with strong opposition from property developers, who were supported by Federico Trillo, a PP member of parliament and a native of Cartagena who later became Minister of the Defence. Sr Trillo and over 50 other PPs protested over the legislation in the Constitutional Court in an attempt to have it repealed, but, after no less than 7 years of deliberations, their objections were systematically overruled one by one and the law remained in force, in theory at least.

However, after the regional elections in 1995, when Ramón Luis Valcárcel of the PP became president of the Murcia government (a post he would hold until 2014), opposition to the legislation strengthened, and finally, in 2001, it was summarily replaced by the Regional Land Law with a one-sentence explanation: “the socialist law harmed the interests of urban development in the area and made it possible to suspend municipal building licences”.

With that sentence the law to protect the Mar Menor was dead and buried, but looking back now, 32 years after it was drawn up, it can be seen as an almost visionary piece of legislation. Many of the measures contained in the current “zero runoff” proposals outlined by the Ministry of Ecological Transition (previously the Ministry of the Environment) are almost carbon copies of those put forward in 1987, but, like so many visionary projects, it seems it was too far ahead of its time.

The law referred to the need for protection in and around the Mar Menor as a result of the “transformation of socio-economic structures and the model of development” of the preceding decades, referring to the boom in tourism and the massive increase in irrigated crop farming following the opening of the Tajo-Segura water supply canal in 1979. Reference was also made to the “impact and deterioration” suffered by the environment to justify an adjustment to land use laws.

At the same time special status was to be granted to the ecosystems of the lagoon and the surrounding land areas according to their ecological, scientific, cultural, recreational and socio-economic characteristics, while urban planning was to be compatible with environmental protection – this was the aspect which allowed the regional government to overrule Town Halls in the granting of building licences.

Similarly, systematic controls were to be put in place on runoff water from all sources, including crop farming, livestock farming and mining, and the traditional bathing jetties along the shore of the Mar Menor were to be protected.

All of this will ring a series of bells very loudly indeed among readers acquainted with the principal measures being proposed and endlessly discussed, but not yet implemented, over three decades later.

Once the Ley de Protección del Mar Menor had been removed (and it is alleged that it was never strictly implemented while still in force), there were far fewer legal limits on urban development and farming. A Greenpeace report indicates that between 1987 and 2011 the amount of built-up land on the coast of the lagoon increased by 55 per cent, while other sources including the World Wildlife Fund and ANSE assert that around a quarter of all irrigated crop farming in the Campo de Cartagena is on land where this activity is theoretically not permitted by the CHS.

Fernando López Miras is right to assert that it is more important to look ahead than to look back, but on the other hand lessons can be learnt from history. Although the party he leads in Murcia, the PP, comes across as the villain in this brief historical retrospective Sr López Miras himself cannot be held responsible for these mistakes in the past: after all, when the Ley de Protección del Mar Menor was passed he was not yet 4 years old.

(However, to state, as he did on Wednesday morning, that the mass death of marine life at the weekend was not caused by harmful runoff water could be misinterpreted as denying that the mistakes of the last 40 years have anything to do with the tragedy.)

But while he and others advocate collaboration and cooperation with their words, it is their actions over the coming days and months which will be more important, and could ultimately lead to the Mar Menor as we know it not being consigned to history along with the law drawn up by José Salvador Fuentes Zorita.