antonio_moralesAntonio Morales. Mayor of Agüimes.

We are at a Fair in the Southeast of Gran Canaria. For eleven years, farmers, ranchers and artisans of this region exhibit the best of their production in the month of November to more than one hundred thousand visitors. It is a great collective party around people who remain faithful to the primary sector.

The main avenues of Ingenio, Agüimes and Santa Lucía become a large open-air market every year to offer a wide variety of local products. And it sells a lot.

And many people save the season with it.. Coinciding with this fair, the Union of small farmers and ranchers (UPA) organized a meeting at the Cruce de Culturas theater in Cruce de Arinaga with men and women from the countryside who traveled from different places on the island to talk about their problems, desires and concerns.

These two manifestations, that revolve around the primary sector, They move me to make some reflections on the need to promote a sector that is absolutely essential for survival that is increasingly engulfed by the large agri-food oligopolies and left by the hand of God by many of the institutions obliged to ensure its existence..

I have repeated ad nauseam that the most effective way to confront the neoliberal globalization that has taken over the world is to stand up at the local level.. Democracy takes on its most important dimension from the next; from neighborhood movements and city councils. This is where the authentic germ of participation in collective affairs is found.. Where the most immediate responses to citizen demands are given.

The defense of municipalism guarantees the sovereignty of the people over the matters that concern them most. And it is also from proximity that we can ensure other sovereignties necessary for the survival of this isolated Canarian community in the middle of the Atlantic..

In recent years we have insisted a lot on defending the need for energy sovereignty for the Canary Islands to break with the monopolies and energy cartels that enhance our dependence on the outside world.; to promote an endogenous generation model that guarantees the self-sufficiency and energy independence of this land through renewables. The reality is that we barely produce a 6% of clean energies and we have to import the 94% of what we consume in the form of fossil fuels from abroad.

And the same thing happens with food.. Currently we depend on more than one 90% of imports to supply ourselves. For a couple of generations in the Canary Islands we have been turning our backs on the rural world.

And the reasons are not very different from those that occur in other places on the planet and have to do with savage capitalism and its desire to monopolize the power that control of the land gives them., raw materials, the seeds, fertilizers, processed foods with enormous collateral damage to health, the prices, the production…

According to Intermón Oxfam, between 300 and 500 companies have the global food trade in their hands. Of them, only ten control the 70%. less than a 10% of landowners own more than 70% of the world's productive lands. In Europe alone, three million rural farms have been lost in just eight years.

The speculation, that puts world peace at risk, hace que los grandes fondos de inversión acaparen los productos y el mercado para aumentar los precios, lo que ha generado un aumento del número de pobres en 70 million; que existan más de mil millones de personas en situación de inseguridad alimentaria; que el consumo energético derivado de las producciones masivas y lejanas contribuyan enormemente al calentamiento global y que el precio de los productos se duplique para 2030.

El mismo Banco Mundial reconoce en distintos informes que la deriva neoliberal ha debilitado el apoyo público disminuyendo las ayudas, créditos y seguros agrarios con que contaban los agricultores.