SANTA CRUZ DE TENERIFE, 22 Sep. (EUROPA PRESS) –
The Study Commission on the demographic challenge and population balance in the Canary Islands was constituted this Thursday in the Parliament of the Canary Islands with Luis Campos (Grupo Nueva Canarias) as president of the Table, Luz Reverón (Grupo Popular) as vice president and Manuel Marrero (Grupo Sí Podemos Canarias) as secretary.
In this first session, the meeting calendar of this body has begun to be outlined, where each parliamentary group will present its proposal of experts to appear.
Likewise, a rapporteur will have to be chosen to accompany the commission in the work to be carried out, collects a note from the Chamber.
The spokesperson for the Canarian Nationalist Group, José Miguel Barragán, shared a document of ideas on the objectives that should define the work of the commission, emphasizing that it is necessary to reach a good diagnosis of the balance of the population in the Canary Islands that contemplates the effects of the depopulation, demographic overgrowth, aging, emigration and immigration, the floating population, the repercussions on infrastructures, the equipment and services involved in each island, the environmental repercussions and adaptation to climate change.
One of the analyzes that needs to be addressed, indicates Barragán, is how to include these concepts in the 2030 Agenda, the Sustainable Development Goals and the EU policies that affect the archipelago, taking into account the conclusions of other studies carried out by political and academic institutions.
For this, it is essential to have a strategy, after a parliamentary mandate to the executive powers, and the plan of measures that should be executed to face the demographic challenge by the institutions and indicate possible actions, he continues.
CC: SET A DEVELOPMENT MODEL
In this line of work, it is essential to specify what level of quality of life and environmental quality is to be achieved, with what model of economic development, how a balance can be achieved on all the islands, also taking into account the islands and municipalities that descend in population and those that experience a “more accelerated” growth, he insists.
Given this scenario, it is necessary to define the infrastructures, equipment and services based on the quality of life and the environment, the economic development to which one aspires and specify which public institutions or private entities would be responsible for starting them up, with what coordination, planning and record budget
The spokesman for the Gomera Socialist Group Parliamentary Group (ASG), Casimiro Curbelo, advocated that public administrations work with the aim of “building a Canary Islands for the future with equal opportunities”, for which he considered it vitally important to address the demographic challenge and the distribution of wealth.
Curbelo was “convinced” that the results of this commission will be appreciated in the next Legislature and “will be crucial to understand what is happening, attend to the real needs of the islands and adapt to them, in order to generate a society with equality of conditions”.
From the outset, he commented, “our parliamentary group has been committed to the fact that the residents of the Canary Islands should have equal opportunities, since, as we have seen in some aspects such as the price of fuel or the shopping basket, sometimes this does not happen, which is why we have been defending the constitution of this commission, in such a way that it allows us to lay the foundations for future growth, especially from an urbanism and territorial planning perspective”.
The also president of the Cabildo de La Gomera insisted that addressing the demographic challenge is “very important, among other reasons, because any territory that has a spatial limit, such as the Canary Islands, must also have a limit to growth, both demographic, tourist, and residential “.
CURBELO HIGHLIGHTS THE DEBATE OF A TOURIST MORATORIUM
He also stated that to address this aspect “there are those who advocate a tourist moratorium, and it has nothing to do with it, since growth takes place when the territory is planned from the territorial and urban point of view.”
The president of the ASG parliamentary group, Melodie Mendoza, in charge of attending on behalf of the formation, highlighted her commitment to defend in the commission measures that allow us to advance towards economic diversification, the territorial redistribution of wealth and equal opportunities between the insular territories, in order to curb any imbalances that may be detected.
“We are aware that all of this requires serious and complex work, but we are convinced that we will be able to find solutions that allow us to benefit our archipelago, especially the less favored territories,” he asserted.
Luis Campos affirmed that this debate forum is a “historic opportunity” to reorient development and guarantee a balanced and sustainable future for the archipelago.
In addition, the importance of carrying out rigorous work was ratified, away from hate messages towards migrants who arrive by boat. They are arguments, he denounced, “false because, not even remotely”, they are responsible for the fact that the Canary Islands have grown by 500,000 inhabitants in the last 20 years.
In similar terms, he spoke when citing those who defend the maxim that, on the islands, “there is no room for anyone else because reality is not so simple.”
Membership in the European Union (EU), Campos pointed out, obliges one of its main foundations to be respected, such as the right to free movement of people and to reside in the territories of the member states, “no matter how much” the Canary Islands have “unique treatment” for being an Outermost Region (OR), which entails the modulation of specific policies and measures for the islands.
NC CLAIMS A SERIOUS JOB
For the parliamentary spokesman for NC, the development of serious work is essential, in which the load capacity that can be supported by the islands that have lost population or have stagnated (El Hierro, La Gomera and La Palma), those with very significant growth (Fuerteventura and Lanzarote) or Gran Canaria and Tenerife, which have a high population density.
Campos emphasized that this approach involves the evaluation of all kinds of measures, from infrastructure to territorial, urban, fiscal and, as a cornerstone, the economic model.
The main policy in tourism, he questioned, has gone through “counting tourists, the more millions the better” and from Nueva Canarias they have always defended “quality over quantity” so reorienting the tourism industry is one of the main tasks to be addressed .
“It is not the same”, he pointed out, managing public policies and the productive sectors for 1.5 million residents at the end of the last century, for the 2,252,000 inhabitants of today or the 2,500,000 Canarians of the next decade, According to the projections of the Economic and Social Council, all this, in parallel, to the needs of the millions of annual visitors.
For Luis Campos, the needs demanded by a population in constant growth, be it with greater or lesser intensity, is one of the reasons that prevent the Canary Islands from leaving, at the state level, the “queue of all parameters”, be it public services essential, employment or others, without forgetting the share of responsibility for the management of public administrations.
