The water war over the transfer from Tajo to Segura has entered a new phase. All communities concerned – Valencian Community, Murcia, Castile-La Mancha and Andalusia – claim that the Council of State has approved them in its latest report (despite taking opposing positions) while they multiply – regardless of whether they preside the PP or the PSOE – the pressure on the government of Pedro Sánchez. According to the planned schedule, next Tuesday the Council of Ministers should approve the project of the Royal Decree that will review 12 hydrological plans for the Spanish river basin for the period 2022-2027. And this revision implies a cut of the most controversial transmission of those that exist in Spain: that which diverts water from the peninsula’s largest river, the Tagus, from its headwaters in Castilla-La Mancha to three municipalities in the south and the Levant.
The (non-binding) opinion of the Council of State, the government’s highest advisory body, considers “it is necessary to mediate an effective mechanism for the coordination of the hydrological plans of the Tagus and Segura river basins among themselves and in relation to the prudential rules of transmission”. “The satisfaction of the general interest requires that the full and binding ecological flow regime, which the Tagus plan must imperatively establish, be made compatible with an element of national hydrological planning such as the diversion through the Tagus-Segura aqueduct. ‘ concludes the 95-page letter, in which there are further allusions to the necessary ecological sustainability of the river. The four communities affected are celebrating the verdict and interpreting it in their favor, and the Ministry of Ecological Transition is silent. The issue is very sensitive, all the more so when only five months are left until the regional and local elections.
The Royal Decree provides that the ecological flow of the Tagus (the minimum volume of water that must always be maintained to preserve it from an ecological point of view) will gradually increase between 2023 and 2027, which in practice means that in certain cases the devolved Amount of water can be reduced. Five Supreme Court judgments and European legislation require this.
The Valencian Generalitat, chaired by Ximo Puig (PSOE), maintains the recommendation made by the Council of State to the government to ensure “the coherence between the allocation and recipient basins”, which would limit the reduction. The regional executive urges Pedro Sánchez’s government to reconsider the royal decree of “rigor and dialogue”, without excluding legal recourse, if the Ministry of Ecological Transition’s plan to reduce the amount of water transferred is maintained – as is already the case It has been carried out since the summer of 2021 – against the demands of the irrigators of Alicante, Murcia and Almería.
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The Valencian President has stated that he considers the Council of State’s opinion “a good start to the journey”. “We want the government to take care of the reasons proposed by the Council of State, but beyond that we are in the sphere of negotiations, agreement, because we want water forever and for that we need to defeat any tribalism, fundamentalism or embezzlement,” demanded Puig His executive highlights the Council of State’s warning that the lack of coordination can cause “a relevant condition for an element of national hydrological planning such as the transfer of the Tagus-Segura”.
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In a much tougher position than Puig, Murcia President Fernando López Miras (PP) has said that Pedro Sánchez “already has a justification [gracias al dictamen] not to approve the cut of the Tajo-Segura transfer”, which, in his view, “is not based on scientific criteria”. An extreme that the Council of State never alludes to.
Quite different is the position of Emiliano García-Page, another socialist baron and President of Castile-La Mancha. “We fought to achieve something that seems incredible that we had to go to court. The water issue is not an issue where Page is right or the president of some other community is right. It’s not a capricious decision, today the problem is not a political one, it’s purely a legal one,” he said on Friday, celebrating the statement supporting the cut in the transfer.
According to the Central Union of Irrigators of the Tajo-Segura Aqueduct (SCRATS), cutting the transfer would make impossible the agriculture that has developed over decades: This group ensures that the infrastructure creates more than 100,000 jobs and that its agri-food industry generates 3,000 million euro contributes to GDP nationally. Another notable fact is that the three provinces benefiting from the works, inaugurated in 1979 and 292 kilometers long, produce 71% of the national exports of vegetables and 25% of fruit. The price is crucial: according to the union, the water from the diversion is three times cheaper than that from desalination plants. Thousands of people demonstrated in Madrid last week against the cuts.
The State Council also put it in black and white that there was “some confusion” at the National Water Council held on November 29 over the text of the royal decree the body approved at the time. The Valencian government has always defended that the text contained a ninth additional provision, according to which the Ministry of Ecological Transition, depending on the environmental situation, would evaluate the application of the minimum ecological flows of the Tagus from 2026. This means that the transfer cut would not be automatic. But the wording that came out did not include that clause. The ruling warns that there has been “confusion” over this provision. And he adds that “it would have been desirable to have a clear and concrete proposal for the text of the project, preferably in writing”.
The Ministry of Ecological Transition and the Valencian Community have since had an intense dispute over the content of the text, which was actually voted on that day in the Water Council. “The resolution says that this whole process was not very transparent and opaque,” agrees Murcia President López Miras.
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