Murcia farmers indignant as the Tajo-Segura water transfers are questioned

The new Minister for Eccological Transition is making few friends in the Region of Murcia…

Representatives of the irrigation farmers of the Region of Murcia have expressed their “indignation” at statements made on Monday by Teresa Ribera, the new Minister for Ecological Transition in the national government of Spain, in which she appeared to question the need for transfers of water to be made from one region of the country to another and even denied that there is a “structural” or inherent deficit in the water supply in the Segura basin (which includes the Region of Murcia and parts of neighbouring provinces).

“If they attack us we will go to the barricades”, warned the “Scrats” irrigation farmers organization in a statement which attributes Sra Ribera’s statements to her ignorance of the situation in the Segura basin.

At the same time, though, her declarations were welcomed in Castilla-La Mancha, where the regional government has this year strongly opposed the transfers of water from the Tajo basin to the Segura, re-opening hostilities in the long-running “water wars” in which Murcia has been periodically involved for decades, its main opponents being not only Castilla-La Mancha but also Aragón.

It may be remembered that there was similar indignation in April, when Pedro Sánchez. Then the leader of opposition party PSOE, indicated that if he came to power the water transfers would be scrapped. He later softened his stance, but now that he is President of the national government it seems inevitable that this issue will be a highly conflictive in Murcia for the foreseeable future.

Those with longer memories will also remember that it was a PSOE government which scrapped plans for an Ebro-Segura transfer canal in 2004.

The whole issue certainly places the PSOE in the Region of Murcia in a difficult position. The party has subscribed to the “regional pact for water”, demanding a continuation of the Tajo-Segura transfers, and leader Diego Conesa will be aware that Teresa Ribera’s statements could be extremely damaging to his chances of success at next year’s regional election.

Sra Ribera describes the structural hydrological deficit in the Segura as “a myth”, but the opposite point of view was convincingly put forward in November 2017 by Miguel Ángel Ródenas, the president of the Confederación Hidrológica del Segura, during a lengthy interview with Murcia Today.

The Minister also suggested that the answer to the water supply problem in Murcia lies largely in desalination plants, but the current drought has illustrated some of the potential problems with that as a solution. There has been some difficulty in transporting desalinated water from the coast to inland areas, and last week’s emergency shutdown of the plant in Águilas due to a burst intake pipe showed that over-dependence on this source may be ill-advised.

In the aftermath of that shutdown, the regional government in Murcia has already announced that it will be demanding that the national administration support and improve desalination infrastructures, interconnecting the plants in order to guarantee that they can be functional 365 days a year.

Miguel Ángel del Amor, the minister for Water, Farming, Agriculture and Fishing in the regional government, also confirmed that he and his colleagues are opposed to the gist of Teresa Ribera’s comments, adding that “if it were not for the water transfer, (the irrigation farmers of the Guadalentín valley) would lose their crops” in the two weeks for which the Águilas desalination plant is out of action.

Image: Teresa Ribera with Juan Espadas, the Mayor of Sevilla, on Monday

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