Producers are tired of having to set aside the pick, harvester, and tractor to dedicate time to paperwork, field notebooks, and digital certificates. They feel buried under “so much bureaucracy” and demand a simplification of the administrative burden to be able to continue with their work. “Agricultural and livestock activities are the most regulated and intervened. There are regulations, laws, and rules at all levels of the administration,” says Miguel López, the island secretary in Tenerife of COAG Canarias, who complains about the treatment towards the sector. “They treat us like criminals,” he laments. Controls are constant, and the submission of documentation is “daily bread”. There are processes that require the presentation of over 20 documents.
The correct use of phytosanitary products, hygiene, and animal welfare are just some of the parameters that are analyzed in the different annual controls. But the administrations also monitor the farms that receive some type of recognition, such as ecological seals, and those that have received grants. “I don’t know how many types of inspections exist, but we had them all last year,” says Natalia Donate, the manager of the company Sat Beig, who acknowledges that there are farmers who “waste a lot of time” sorting out paperwork to “meet the requirements imposed by the authorities”.
S. R. M., a 39-year-old young farmer, was forced last year to apply for permanent disability due to worsening health from not being able to rest after finishing his workday. “After spending hours on the farm, I would come home and not rest, I had to start sorting out documents,” he recalls. Now he remains linked to the sector, helping other young producers to deal with the submission of all the paperwork. The biggest problem he encounters? Legal insecurity. “The rules of the game change with the issue of grants, and it is very complicated for young people to deal with all that administrative burden,” he criticizes. According to S. R. M., it is essential to have knowledge of law and to understand the “regulatory scale” to be able to fight with the officials “when they make mistakes”.
Pressure
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The bureaucratic pressure has reached such a point that some producers choose not to participate in the procedures to receive grants to avoid having to deal with the paperwork. “They prefer to buy a tractor with their own money, rather than submitting documents and justifying every step they take,” says Donate. And it’s because farmers face penalties if they do not meet the requirements imposed by the authorities to receive the grants.
According to the COAG representative, the control of public money expenditure in the sector is excessive. “You can’t have a system based on the idea that we are all criminals, a simplification needs to be made,” he states.
The agricultural engineer, Iosu Arostegui, specifically helps the farms in the islands to carry out the procedures to comply with the regulations and access grants. The expert believes that the problem lies not in the presentation of documents but in the time it takes for the aid to reach the farmers and breeders, who often have to rely on “savings” to continue in the sector. “Some request a loan because the money does not arrive until two years after applying for it,” he assures. The island secretary in Tenerife of COAG states that “when the administrations want to”, they can speed up the arrival of aid.
The impact of technology in an aging sector – 62% of farm managers in Canarias are over 55 years old – is another concern of the associations. Not only because of the obligation to submit digitized documents to comply with the controls, but also due to the trend towards digital field notebooks (where all farm activities are recorded). The Minister of Agriculture, Luis Planas, announced last week that the change will be voluntary, but incentives will be established for its implementation. “We understand that young people are expected to have digital skills, but the authorities must take into account the age of the producers and that this kind of change cannot be made overnight,” points out López. COAG also demands that Europe impose the same control on imports coming from third countries. “We are in favor of protecting consumer health, but products coming from outside must also play by the same rules,” he insists.
