Minister refuses to confirm whether or not Spain will get more water
Portugal’s minister for the environment has today referred to an agreement between Portugal and Spain to “regularise” the amount of water taken everyday by Spanish farmers from Portugal’s Alqueva reservoir.
As state news channel RTP reported recently, each of the 40 Spanish water ‘intakes in Alqueva uses, per day, the equivalent of a couple’s consumption in a year, without paying a cent to Portugal’.
According to RTP, more than €40 million is at stake.
“There’s a lot of noise, a lot that’s being said in the Alentejo, so now there’s the technical work of accounting for all the water abstractions and there’s an agreement already in place regarding the settling of accounts,” minister Maria da Graça Carvalho told a joint conference with Spain’s Minister for the Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge, Teresa Ribera, at the Ministry of the Environment in Lisbon.
The meeting however was not about Alqueva’s water abstractions per se: according to Lusa it covered “various topics, including the environment, water management and energy”.
The reason for not discussing Alqueva, according to Maria da Graça Carvalho, was because ‘there is already an agreement in place, and technical work has been carried out by the Portuguese Environment Agency (APA), the competent Directorate-General and the Alqueva Development and Infrastructure Company (EDIA)’.
An attempt to pin the minister down on whether or not Spain is asking for more water, elicited the response that “there is a principle of fairness” in the agreement that the two countries hope to finalise in September.
But that was as far as it went.
Maria da Graça Carvalho gave little else away, albeit she did admit that increasing irrigated farms on the Spanish side is not on the table, as some communities, such as Andalusia, want.
With regard to Spain’s abstractions from the Tejo, Portugal is also asking for verification of the daily ecological flow – something the country has never achieved, she added
In March, proTEJO, the movement fighting for the Tejo’s preservation sent a complaint to the European Commission alleging “non-compliance with the Water Framework Directive” due to the “non-implementation of ecological flows” by both Spain and Portugal, resulting in “ecological, economic, social and cultural damage”.
Today’s meeting also addressed the issue of ‘funds for new infrastructure’, said the minister – referring to “another desalination plant on the Atlantic coast of the Alentejo” (to service hectares of intensive greenhouse cultures), which, “may be necessary”.
“We need funding for this: Spain has €1 billion euros in the PRR for water. Unfortunately we don’t, we only have around €200 million in the Algarve. To deal with this lack of funding, we’re going to look at other funds and one of the possibilities is the European Investment Bank, for joint projects with Spain it could be very interesting,” she said.
Opposition to the whole concept of desalination continues, with groups and experts fighting this corner agreeing that were it not for funding, Portugal would not be considering desalination projects at all. ND
Source material: LUSA/ Greensavers
