The vice president of the Portuguese Environment Agency (APA), Pimenta Machado, said this Sunday that irrigation wastes more than a third of the water reserves in Portugal and warned of the need to make the systems more efficient.
In a year of drought, Pimenta Machado reiterated that the the situation is “dramatic” in some parts of the countrywith reserves below normal, but considered that the solution is not only to build more dams, but also to solve waste problems, indicating that “irrigation systems waste more than 35% of water.”
As he explained, Agriculture consumes 75% of the water used in the country and more than a third of it continues to be wasted in transportation losses, due to the age of the systems, many built in the 1950s, and considered that “The way is to make the systems more efficient.”
“What is needed is to modernize the channels. Today it makes no sense to lose water through transport, so the focus is on efficiency, but also on finding new sources of water, for example using water from WWTPs. [Estações de Tratamentos de Águas Residuais] to wash dumpsters, streets, water gardens,” he said.
The vice president of the APA was speaking at a forum on drought and irrigation, in Vila Flor, in the district of Bragança, and specified that Portugal consumes the equivalent of “two Alquevas” of water annuallywith around 75% of this being used for irrigation in agriculture.
In this sector, he highlighted two realities of the country, south of the Tagus and northeast of Trás-os-Montes, where, as he said, “drought is structural and not a matter of water scarcity.”
The path is for the sectors to be more efficient, we ask for more dams, and of course more dams must be built, but this year we are distressed, it is not because we do not have dams, we have dams, they do not have water”, he defended.
Present at the Forum do Ambiente initiative organized by the municipality of Vila Flor, within the scope of the Expovila fair, the regional director of Agriculture and Fisheries of the North, Carla Alves, assured that there is financing for the rehabilitation and modernization of the existing systems of irrigation and gave as an example the Vilariça Valley Irrigation Association, in Trás-os-Montes, which has approved a project worth 1.5 million euros for the improvement of the Burga and Salgueiro dams.
Carla Alves stressed that the next notice of applications for the Rural Development Plan (PDR) is intended precisely for the acquisition “of everything necessary for efficient irrigation, whether sensors, drones, weather stations, which allow accounting for what the city needs to drink. plant”. .
THE Regional director defended that it is also necessary to continue investing in hydro-agricultural developmentsbut also in traditional practices such as dry farming in the Trás-os-Montes region, more adapted to climate change.
Carla Alves stressed that if almond trees, olive groves and vines of native varieties continue to be planted in this region, “in normal years they are plants that manage to function without irrigation and manage to be productive.”
“It is obvious that we can increase the quantities if the olive groves, the vineyards, the almond trees are irrigated, but if not, they are resistant plants that are capable of adapting to these climatic changes and that is why this has to be committed to the future”, defended.
Source: Observadora
