“The Field is planted in Madrid.” It is the motto of the First Edition of the 'Desayunos del Campo', an event defined by its promoters as “the new reference forum to reflect on the challenges and opportunities of the rural world in Spain” and sponsored by SOS Rural, an agrarian lobby known for spreading false claims about renewable energies.
According to their campaigns, photovoltaic panels “sterilize the countryside and increase the risk of fires.” “Where a plaque is planted, nothing grows again for decades,” they also say. Last July, this organization announced the launch of a macro judicial case throughout Spain against solar plants that, in its opinion, affect land with high crop value. Sources from the association point out that they are not against renewables, but they reject the “disorderly” expansion that only seeks “the maximum benefit of the companies.”
The event sponsored by SOS Rural and the Community of Irrigators of Campo de Cartagena will feature as speakers the former president of the Government Felipe González, along with two other historic former socialist leaders, the former presidents of Andalusia and Extremadura, Susana Díaz and Juan Carlos Rodríguez Ibarra, respectively; the former vice president Soraya Sáenz de Santamaría and another well-known former PP politician, Manuel Lamela, former Minister of Health and Consumer Affairs with Esperanza Aguirre in the Community of Madrid.
The meeting will be next Wednesday at the Mandarin Oriental Ritz Hotel in the capital. The official program of the event indicates that the institutional opening will be “led by His Excellency Mr. Felipe González”, who has recently shown sympathy for some postulates of SOS Rural.
In January 2024, the former socialist president (who until 2015 was a director of Gas Natural, the current Naturgy, Spain's first gas company) defined nuclear energy as “the least polluting” of the generation sources and attacked photovoltaic and wind power, falsely stating that Spanish regulations do not specify who has the “responsibilities” of dismantling the solar parks when they reach the end of their useful life, that they “are never recyclable,” occupy “a huge piece of land” and they put an end to “agriculture.”
At the event sponsored by SOS Rural, Felipe González will participate in a round table on “Cohesion and territory: the challenge of depopulated Spain” together with Soraya Sáenz de Santamaría. Current advisor to Moeve (the former Cepsa), the former vice president has been linked to the Cuatrecasas law firm for years, which has achieved several sentences against the Kingdom of Spain in the multimillion-dollar arbitrations by international investors against the cuts that Mariano Rajoy's Government applied to the remuneration of renewables.
Another round table on “Unfair competition for Spanish agricultural products” will be held at the conference sponsored by SOS Rural. Rodríguez Ibarra, Susana Díaz and Lamela will participate in it. The latter was Undersecretary of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food with José María Aznar.
Lamela was hired as a lobbyist in Brussels a decade ago, when the PP governed, by the Australian mining company Berkeley, which then intended to open a uranium mine in Salamanca and which is now demanding million-dollar compensation from Spain for prohibiting the extraction of this mineral in the Climate Change Law.
When Berkeley hired Lamela, the European Commissioner for Energy was Miguel Arias Cañete, his former boss at the Ministry of Agriculture. A state lawyer on leave, like Sáez de Santamaría, Lamela was a client of Equipo Economico, the law firm founded by former minister Cristóbal Montoro that this summer was involved in an influence peddling scandal.
The initial program of the SOS Rural event also announced a “paranormal” guest who would participate “direct from the Fourth Millennium.” The event will finally not be able to count on Iker Jiménez, known for his hoaxes about the DANA of Valencia. Last June, the famous presenter was one of the most applauded participants at an ultra-liberal conference in Madrid that was closed by the Argentine president, Javier Milei.
The host of the SOS Rural event will be the COPE sports journalist Juanma Castaño, who in September linked the protests against Israel in La Vuelta ciclismo with ETA.
The moderator of this round table with Rodríguez Ibarra, Susana Díaz and Lamela will be Natalia Corbalán, current national spokesperson for SOS Rural. Corbalán is also the CEO of the entity behind this association, the Ingenio Foundation, financed by the irrigators of Campo de Cartagena and known for having misinformed for years about the Mar Menor.
A little over a year ago, this medium reported one of the SOS Rural campaigns, focused on launching hoaxes against renewables. Created in 2023 in the wake of the BBB (Citizen Peasant Movement) that swept the provincial elections that year in the Netherlands, SOS Rural defines itself as “a non-partisan, but not apolitical, spontaneous, plural and independent citizen group.”
In addition to the Ingenio Foundation, hunting and fishing associations from all over Spain and others such as the Spanish Gallo Combatiente Association, the International Bullfighting Association or the Bullfighting Peñas Group have been part of it, according to a list published in 2023.
Fundación Ingenio was created in 2020. It has among its patrons large agricultural exporters such as Agromark or Gregal, and the two main irrigation cooperatives in Murcia.
In March 2024, Ecologists in Action of the Region of Murcia awarded the Ingenio Foundation its Atila Awards, which “distinguish and denounce those people, entities or projects that have stood out the most for their contribution to the destruction of the environment” in the Murcia territory, “for dedicating so much effort and money to a constant campaign of misinformation and trying to eliminate any type of legal control that protects the environment and citizens from corporate abuses.”
Ingenio was among the instigators of several hoaxes that infiltrated the agrarian protests at the beginning of 2024. Then, Natalia Corbalán assured that “our salads are in the hands of Mohamed VI”, in reference to vegetable imports from Morocco. The reality is that Spain is the second largest exporter of fruits and vegetables in the EU, only behind the Netherlands.
In March 2024, SOS Rural hired Javier Poza as general secretary, who had been working in Brussels for 14 years for the Union of Small Farmers (UPA), one of the main agricultural unions in Spain, and as an advisor to the political group Renew Europe, in which Ciudadanos was registered. The current deputy spokesperson for SOS Rural is Lucía Parro, PSOE councilor in Pantoja (Toledo).
In recent months, the entity has distanced itself from Vox, but this was not always the case. SOS Rural had as its spokesperson the farmer and former military man Víctor Viciedo, infantry colonel in the reserve and president of the Valencian Independent Farmers Association.
Unrelated to the current SOS Rural, Viciedo blamed last August, after this summer's fires, “the green laws” for being the “perfect fuel” for these events. As spokesperson for the agrarian organization, he starred in several Vox events and appeared on Iker Jiménez's program. On his YouTube channel, he wonders if “Soros and Bill Gates are behind renewables in Spain.”