On November 8, 2021, the COAG sent a document of allegations in response to a first version of the draft royal decree for the management of the bovine sector. For the Cooperative, it is moving to a model of fewer, larger, more intensified farms, less linked to the territory.
According to a statement from the COAG, the data from the Ministry is that approximately 93% of livestock farms with deliveries of milk in the Spanish State and 98% of those that feed calves and suckler cows have farms with less than 180 UGM . “We cannot understand that the Ministry opts for the consolidation of faits accomplis, propping up the growth of the largest farms (which have been displacing the smallest for years), and not for the protection of the social and productive fabric of the sector,” they say.
The Ministry continues to rely on methodologies that relativize greenhouse gas emissions, and push for a greater intensification of livestock farms, while ignoring the impact of transport
Greenhouse effect
During the first week of April, the European Commission’s proposal to modify the Industrial Emissions Directive was received, proposing to monitor all beef farms larger than 150 LUs. “Betting on the growth of farms and on the disengagement of the territory in the bovine sector seems to us, at this time and for all of the above, to go against the present and future viability of the sector,” the Cooperative explained in a statement.
The Ministry continues to rely on methodologies that relativize greenhouse gas emissions, and push for a greater intensification of livestock farms, while ignoring the impact of transport on the import of raw materials for animal feed (many of them from areas in risk of deforestation) and the scarcity of resources that this model of increasingly larger farms will face in the immediate future.
