Mallorca’s farming challenge All the agricultural land that is non-productive

Palma.—The Balearic directorgeneral for agriculture, Fernando Fernández, has highlighted a “worrying situation” in respect of agricultural land in the Balearics. Data from the regional and national agriculture ministries indicate that 133,772 hectares of this land is non-productive. The bulk of this land - 126,082 hectares is defined as “inactive”, while the rest has been abandoned.

The Balearic ministry has refined data from the national ministry, and this process has led to the calculation of abandoned land being double that which had initially been estimated.

Fernández explains that detailed work has identified the useful agricultural land surface -”municipality by municipality, plot by plot”. “This has made it possible to discover all the land that would be usable for agricultural purposes.” The calculations are directly linked to the Common Agricultural Policy. More than 270,000 plots of one form or another have not been declared within the CAP for many years, meaning that they are classified as non-productive.

Palma pilot project

At national level there is a working group for the “mobilisation” of land, Fernández saying that recovery of agricultural land is one of the national ministry’s greatest concerns. And this is shared by regional governments such as Galicia, where a land bank has been set up to assist with funding.

Something similar is being considered for the Balearics, where the challenge is to “mobilise all this useful land for agricultural use”. Palma town hall did announce a land bank pilot project for the municipality in October 2022, but that was the last that was heard of it.