With the same conditions throughout Spain because the diversity of situations poses great legal uncertainty
-The Popular Group in Congress has presented a Proposal not of Law in Congress in which it urges the Government to establish uniformly throughout the Spanish territory the authorization and conditions for travel to private or self-sufficient gardens, through the timely instruction to the State Security Forces and Bodies, for the care or collection in certain cases.
Said authorization would be established for work and collection in self-consumption gardens whose lack of attention may cause irreparable losses, and / or in attention to the socioeconomic situation of the family unit of the interested party.
They could also be accessed for the care and feeding of animals considered cases of force majeure (under Article 7.1 of Royal Decree 463/2020). It is also about establishing with precision that the activity will be carried out within the municipal term of the place of residence, or at a prudential distance from it, individually, for the necessary agricultural activity and applying the rules established for the protection of health and safety. of the citizen.
In the explanatory memorandum of the initiative, signed by the GPP spokesperson, Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo, the secretary general of the Popular Group, Guillermo Mariscal, and the deputies Carmen Navarro Lacoba, Tomás Cabezón and Alberto Herrero, it is indicated that the confinement decreed by Royal Decree 463/2020 and the successive alarm extensions have caused an application model for the entire territory of the state that causes paradoxical situations, such as allowing queuing at the door of supermarkets but instead prohibiting travel to orchards that do not they are considered agricultural exploitation, although they constitute the main sustenance and supply of many families in rural areas.
Around 16.2% of the Spanish population lives in rural Spain, which occupies 84.1% of the territory. A different way of life but also a different productive model, which has allowed to show, in these times of pandemic, the resilience of small municipalities and also the diligence with which they have followed the confinement rules, designed largely for the problem of big cities and their way of life.
Thus, successive confinement decrees to try to stop the spread of the coronavirus epidemic have considered essential activities carried out by agri-food companies as a whole; however, these same rules restrict and create an interpretative gap regarding freedom of movement for access to orchards or fields for private or non-professional use. These lands or orchards, in addition to their function for self-consumption, constitute a source of complementary income in rural areas for many families, via cooperatives or retail markets.
In the current economic situation, regulation of this activity becomes more essential. The situation has been resolved in different ways in the different autonomous communities: from the regulation by the Ministry of Rural Affairs in Galicia to the complete prohibition of displacement in Castilla-La Mancha, the case of Toledo, causing irreparable damage to the owners or producers by the loss of crops, lack of irrigation or other agricultural work that must be carried out, passing through the discretion of the State Security Forces and Bodies when traveling to activities of this type in other provinces of the same Autonomous Community.
The diversity of situations is a major problem for self-sufficiency, but it also poses great legal uncertainty for the population and for the State Security Forces and Bodies in the exercise of their functions. In addition, the GPP points out that it must be taken into account that some interpretations made from the Delegations of the Government of Aragon or Extremadura, or even from provincial areas such as the Zamora subdelegation, all of them rural, depopulated and geographically dispersed territories, have seen how their different way of life has been correctly taken into account, relieving their countrymen of such a restrictive burden made from an exclusively urban vision.
