Fires, farmers and the agri-food industry

With forest fires, there are a few pieces that don't fit: we have learned the importance for a country of its food sovereignty to not depend on third parties, and to preferably consume zero-kilometer products, in order to reduce the ecological footprint as much as possible. These are products that our farmers, often sons and grandsons of farmers, could produce, who would very much like to stay on their lands, but the numbers don't add up because they are strangled by prices or cannot compete in quantity.

The result is that the rural environment is abandoned, the forest grows uncontrollably and the threat of fires increases, but we continue to bring food from very far away because it is cheaper. We already know that price weighs heavily on the purchasing decision, but in the end it will turn out that the cheapest ends up being more expensive, because this imbalance, which expels farmers and leads to abandoned crops, exacerbates the fight against fires that, moreover, are much faster and more uncontrollable than decades ago due to climate change.

I don't have the solution. I don't know if, just as other economic sectors are helped with public money, budgets for the rural environment, which is strategic, should be increased. And if a new relationship needs to be established between the alliance between the powerful Catalan agri-food industry and farmers. All I know is that summers pass, the announcements of not lighting a cigarette butt in the forest, the pyrocumulus, the Generalitat Firefighters doing a great job, typical of a developed country, and let's see if we're lucky with the September floods and forget about the fires (for a few months, because winters are shorter every year). Also thinking about fires, either peasantry or death.