The Spanish ministry of agriculture and the State Commercial Society for Agrarian Infrastructure (Seiasa) have signed three collaboration agreements on irrigation that will involve mobilizing a public-private investment of 745.40 million euros in 11 autonomous communities.
The Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, Luis Planas, reiterated that the modernization of irrigation will once again have a preferential character in the Spanish government’s agricultural policy in the new legislature, because he says sustainable irrigation is the basis of the present and future of agricultural production.
Planas highlighted that these investments are key to promoting sustainable, efficient and modern irrigation, which is a fundamental pillar of the Spanish agri-food system, but also to guarantee the future of rural areas.
He recalled that the ministry is immersed in the most ambitious volume of investment in irrigation modernization in history, with a volume that will exceed 2,344 million euros between 2022 and 2027. This means multiplying by three the annual average of investments of the last two decades.
In total, the irrigation of 700,000 hectares of crops will be modernized and will benefit about 20,000 farmers. These investments are completed with the projected works launched by the Ministry for the Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge worth 5,000 million euros.
The minister recalled the importance of irrigation in the agricultural production system of Spain, which in 2022 had an irrigated area of 3,771,000 hectares and, despite being only 23 percent of the total cultivated land, in them 65 percent of the total value of plant production is obtained. Thanks to irrigation systems, Planas stressed, the value of Spanish agricultural production has grown by 60 percent so far this century.