“It is impossible at this time not to talk about the tragedy the country has experienced in recent weeks. This year, 250,000 hectares burnt in Portugal, 60 times the area of the city of Porto. We lost four human lives, properties, landscapes, and territory, and it’s hard to look at all this, year after year, without thinking that the state has failed in recent decades”, stated José Pedro Aguiar-Branco at the ceremony marking the 150th anniversary of the Royal Humanitarian Association of Porto Volunteer Firefighters.
For the President of the Parliament, the state has failed not only in combating fires because when a fire starts, it is a sign that something was already wrong before.
“I am from a time when owning land was an asset. Today, too often, it is just a burden,” he noted.
José Pedro Aguiar-Branco reminded that cleaning a hectare of land costs at least 600 euros annually, depending on the region and the type of terrain.
And this, he added, in a country with low wages and small landowners, is an expense that makes a difference.
When it comes time to clear the forest, public support has been delayed, and often these do not differentiate between land next to a settlement, which is a heritage and priority to clear, and that which is in an isolated wilderness, he opined.
“If there’s a lesson we have to learn, it’s that forest policy and land planning cannot be built on supports that don’t arrive and fines that still penalize more,” he asserted.
In his view, the state must fulfill its responsibilities not only in the summer when the forest burns but before.
These responsibilities include the registration of lands, the identification of properties and their owners, the management of communal lands to avoid the consequences of neglect, easing of burdens, licenses and bureaucracies, and treating foresters as allies.
“The responsibility to make, in a word, policy, to have integrated policies and not angling measures. Because, besides the fires, it is also necessary to talk about desertification, demography, and territorial cohesion, land planning, the green economy, and community funds, dams, water and environmental policy,” he emphasized.
Aguiar-Branco believes the country does not need firefighting politicians but politicians who are politicians and capable of dialogue to build joint solutions.
Politicians capable of thinking about the problems not to respond to the controversy of the week on the media agenda but to prepare for future challenges with seriousness, he insisted.
“In the seat where I sit, in the plenary, beyond the occasional parliamentary incidents that occur here and there, I see this dialogue happening every day. I know it is possible, I know that the Parliament is the right place to make these decisions, to change what needs to be changed,” he concluded.
Questioned by journalists about the comments by the President of the Republic, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, regarding his US counterpart, Donald Trump, Aguiar-Branco refused to comment.
