He avocado consumption It is in fashion. The European market demands around 5,500 tonnes every week and Spain is the largest producer on the continent. For this reason, the south of our country is facing a serious environmental problem related to the industrial cultivation of this fruit. Water resources are depleted, soil erosion is increasing and the destruction of a system based on family farms is encouraged.
These are some of the shocking conclusions drawn from the new chapter on agricultural extractivism in the report The real price of food. The hidden face of agribusiness in the Iberian Peninsulapublished by Ecologistas en Acción. The work highlights that the selling price of avocados continues to rise. A boom that has led many agricultural companies to abandon other crops and to promote only this fruit. The cultivated surface has increased by 30% in our country since 2018. The problem is that in many of these parts it does not rain enough, leading to overexploitation of water.
Provinces such as Malaga and Granada are plagued with avocado fields, a phenomenon that is increasingly observed in Cadiz, especially in Campo de Gibraltar. “This area is protected and has suffered a brutal increase in plantationsThere are about 3,000 hectares of cultivation, of which At least 1,000 are completely illegal“, warns Juan Corrales, spokesman for Ecologists in Action in Verdemar-Campo de Gibraltar. Illegal means that the plantations are listed as dry land, but are actually irrigated, often fed by clandestine wells or through the resale of water by irrigation communities.
“Last week we detected more than 1,000 illegal wells in the Campo de Gibraltar area alone,” Corrales reports. In 2017, between 30% to 40% of the nearly 13,000 hectares of irrigated land in the Axarquía region (Málaga) were illegal plantations. Despite the severe droughts in the following years, the irrigated area has continued to grow, reaching 15,000 hectares today. “To give you an idea, an 18-hole golf course has 60 hectares and uses 60,000 m3 of water. The same area of avocado crops requires 600,000 m3 of water,” adds the environmentalist.
“We are faced with a scenario that is impossible from a hydrological point of view,” agrees Rafael Yus, spokesman for Ecologistas in Malaga. In addition to the “enormous water footprint, all the previous vegetation is destroyed, Leaving the mountains bare to grow avocados. Terraces or slopes are built that erode with the rain,” he says. This, added to the water deficit, causes the “loss of river ecosystems and biodiversity.” It also has a carbon footprint: “For much of the water to reach the slope it has to be pumped, increasing energy consumption.”
Finally, this agro-industrial model generates inequalities. In the producing areas, agricultural incomes are among the lowest in the countrywith Moclinejo in the Axarquía recording 7,972 euros per person per year. In terms of employment, only one person is hired for every five hectares of avocado, while vegetable cultivation employs 15 people on that surface. The group warns that this system is expanding to other provinces such as Huelva, Murcia, Alicante or the Algarve, places with little rainfall that do not meet the irrigation needs of this subtropical fruit.