Scores turn out to demonstrate against agro-industry’s monopoly on rapidly disappearing water
https://www.portugalresident.com/scores-turn-out-to-demonstrate-against-agro-industrys-monopoly-on-rapidly-disappearing-water/No matter how much people have tried to bring balance to a situation that now sees 90% of all water leaving the dam going to intensive agriculture owned by foreign berry growers, iniquities persist.
It has reached the stage where local people (previously conceded 6% of water pumped out at a rate of 1,000-litres per second) are finding themselves cut off from water supplies altogether.
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“It’s an environmental disaster”, he stresses, particularly “as the berry growers have already bulldozed out of existence rare and meant-to-be protected habitats for which Portugal received funds from the EU…
The same berry growers, “who have effectively taken over AB Mira, are domiciled abroad, mostly in the States and Holland through a blizzard of different companies which own other companies etc. etc., and have received massive tax rebates from the Portuguese government on the tax that they did pay here in 2019.
AB Mira “even cut off the flow into the original river until we raised a stink greater than that raised by the drying and dying river bed (click here).
“The whole thing is made infinitely worse by climate change which has led to a drier local habitat visible on a daily basis,” Frank continues.
the berry growers “employ few locals”. Their workforce is made up almost entirely of around “16,000 poorly paid Nepalese, Pakistani and Indian semi-slaves”