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Date Published: 17/05/2022

ARCHIVED - Murcia farmers face fines of over 3 million euros for burning agricultural waste

ARCHIVED ARTICLE

A new law will penalise farmers in the Murcia Region for lighting bonfires

<span style='color:#780948'>ARCHIVED</span> - Murcia farmers face fines of over 3 million euros for burning agricultural waste

The burning of agricultural waste in rural Murcia is a long-standing tradition, and sometimes a nuisance for people living near farms that practiced it, but the regional government has done an about-turn on the controversial practice and drafted a new law which recognises the burning of vegetation as a “risk” to the environment and human health.

The legislation seeks to remove the formerly grey area and specifies that “the burning of green waste generated in the agricultural or forestry environment” is generally prohibited, with a few specific and tightly-controlled exceptions.

Up until this point, the law was ambiguous, stating that farmers could set fire to unwanted vegetation “on an exceptional basis, and as long as they have the corresponding individualised authorisation that allows said burning, for reasons of a phytosanitary nature that cannot be addressed with another type of treatment.”

Now, however, the Ministry for Ecological Transition considers the burning of scrub to be a “very serious offence,” punishable with fines ranging between 100,000 and 3.5 million euros.

“Now there is no room or confusion for the norm,” said José Antonio Herrera, a member of Ecologists in Action, “the law explicitly reflects the problem of agricultural burning at the state and regional level and considers them a risk to human health and environment.”

With the new legislation, the regional government wants to push recycling as the first option, turning land waste into wood chips and compost wherever possible.

Quite aside from the environmental risk it poses, there has been growing social reaction against the practice, with health workers also warning about the respiratory and cardiovascular diseases that can be caused by smoke inhalation.

A new waste law has caused uproar in the Valencian Community, where farmers have simply said they will ignore the rules if certain allowances aren’t made. As a result, the regional authorities have created an exception and conceded to burning green waste due to phytosanitary risks.

Image: Pixabay

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