Strawberries threaten the Doñana natural park already ravaged by drought

Germans are crazy about strawberries, but the soft fruits that are sold in Germany are starting to taste bitter. Most of the strawberries on this market – where they are on sale all year round – in fact come from Spain and in particular fromAndalusia where the controversy is now raging over the hypothesis of expanding a cultivation area dedicated to these fruits to the detriment of a nature reserve.

Taste one of the fragrant red fruits in Germany risks having an impact on the environmental protection of the Iberian Peninsula, given that the region would like to expand the strawberry cultivation area within the wetland of 800 hectares by Donana declared a Biosphere Reserve by Unesco in 1980 and then a World Heritage Site in 1994. That of Doñana, 122,000 hectares between natural park and “buffer zone”, it is one of the most important protected areas in Europe, spread over about ten municipalities in the provinces of Huelva, Seville and Cadiz. Due to its surface and its climate in the winter months it hosts hundreds of thousands of migratory birds.

But the area is also home to numerous farms that have thrived thanks to legal and illegal wells used to divert large quantities of water essential for the cultivation of vegetables and fruit, especially for strawberries sold throughout Europe but mainly in Germany which is the most major customer in the world of Andalusian strawberries: In 2021, of the 324,000 tons of strawberries produced in this Spanish region, 113,000 tons arrived in German supermarkets. Water, essential for the cultivation of strawberries, water-intensive fruitsis extracted from the same stratum that should maintain the ecological balance of the area: the risk is the drying up of the wetland.

According to WWF and other environmental protection organizations the groundwater level in the Doñana reserve it has been in steep decline for years, and data from the national park’s biological station indicate that almost 60% of all lagoons have dried up in the last decade. The Andalusian government project that would threaten the natural paradise intends to help agriculture which is the economic engine of the underdeveloped province of Huelva. Strawberries play a key role in this project: according to the Interfresa association, red fruits have ensured 100,000 jobs in 2021 and almost 8% of gross income in Andalusia. The ongoing dispute sees the Andalusian government, the central government of Madrid and Brussels, ecologists and farmers clashing to protect the nature reserve.

The EU threatens punishment, UNESCO warns that the Doñana National Park will be removed from the list if the project is carried forward, the WWF, according to which about 300 liters of water are used to produce a kilo of strawberries, has launched a collection of signatures that is having great success. Madrid does not intend to sit idly by while studying possible actions to protect the nature reserve, the Spanish agriculture minister Luis Planas he declared: “Doñana is for biodiversity what the Prado is for painting, something that we must defend, this government will do everything necessary to ensure that this initiative does not come to fruition”.