Asaja demands unifying Agriculture and Environment to halt the deterioration of the countryside and depopulation.

The provincial organizations of Asaja in Ávila and Valladolid have called for an "urgent reorganization" of the public management of environmental policies so that they are reintegrated into the same ministerial portfolio or department as agriculture and livestock. They have assured that "this is not a new or capricious demand," recalling that Spain already had a Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries, Food, and Environment, and Castile and León had at the beginning of the autonomous state a Department of Agriculture, Livestock, and Forests. "That structure responded to an unquestionable reality: the territory, the environment, and agricultural and forestry production form an inseparable whole," they pointed out. However, environmental policies "have become the real sword of Damocles for the Spanish countryside and, especially, for the Castilian and Leonese countryside," as "decisions made from a lack of knowledge of the rural environment, far from the day-to-day life of farmers and ...