From May 24 to 26, 2023, a seminar was organised on "Migration from certain regions: a threat to equal opportunities”. USO organised this seminar – CCFAS (Union Sindical Obrera – Confederal Center for Training and Social Action) jointly with MCL / EFAL (Movimento Cristiano Lavoratori / Ente Nazionale per la Formazione e l'Addestramento dei Lavoratori), the first under the umbrella of EZA that takes place in two countries with mirror presentations on the situation in both countries, it has tried to make an x-ray of depopulation in Europe and how it affects inequality of opportunities. The European Union funded the seminar.
And here, in Villafranca del Bierzo, we know the reality of the entire northwestern Iberian in this first part of the project.
In the first photograph of the seminar, we got to know El Bierzo in depth. The only region of Castilla y León, within the province of León, borders Galicia and Asturias and is close to Zamora and Portugal. With some of them, especially with the south of Asturias, it shares part of its problems concerning energy and ecological transitions.
El Bierzo was a pioneer region based on mining, energy, and the steel industry during the industrial revolution. Its demographic peak was experienced in the past 60s, but, since then, it has yet to lose population until losing, last year, the horizon of 120,000 people, more than a 10% loss in the previous decade.
Among some of the conclusions of the diagnosis, El Bierzo lacks a training offer that allows its young people to bet on studying and starting to work there, which causes mostly non-return emigration of the key generation to sustain the population's future. And, especially, the energy transition and decarbonisation damage, which only meant closures and not substitutions. Thirty-five thousand mining jobs were lost, 20,000 of them in the small region of Laciana, which condemned the entire Bierzo to extremely high unemployment.
Those closures were of macro-companies, but the few substitute projects that saw the light of day have been micro-projects with little employment, wealth, and, therefore, few opportunities.
El Bierzo also lacks good infrastructure, both railways, without a fast railway, seeing the tracks pass through other provinces, and in terms of highways: precisely with the regions with which it is most related, Asturias and Ourense, it does not have a high-speed rail capacity, only with Lugo.
This photograph of El Bierzo is similar to the one shown over Asturias, Cantabria, and northwestern Portugal. All of them were hit by deindustrialisation and decarbonisation without anaesthesia, punished with fewer and worse infrastructures, and, with all this, aged and depopulated.
Some of the points of light exposure are the commitment to sustainable tourism, which, however, should only be a complement to main activities; the industrial-technological centre of Asturias; and advances in depopulation policies in Cantabria, where there are already bills that make it possible to provide budgets for policies in this area. However, the speakers and participants emphasise a critical European industrial approach, supported by tax harmonisation, which allows us not to steal the industry from each other and to fight against relocation.
In Portugal, the great dichotomy is between the coast and the interior. Almost half of the population is in the metropolitan areas of Lisbon and Porto, and of the rest, the majority is in small cities, almost all on the coast, and only 26% in towns. This trend towards large cities has grown in recent years, and Portugal has become a country of regional asymmetries, with the interior always needing help establishing a population.
A fateful decision for the interior in recent history has been the intervention of the Troika during the financial crisis: the obligation of austerity and cuts left the rural interior without social services, grouping them into regional heads to save but alienating them from the citizens, or also with less investment in infrastructure. The population opted even more, to emigrate to cities with more services. At present, it is about reversing specific measures for the interior, but many of them are too clear and symbolic to achieve a global result.
With the expansion of teleworking during the pandemic, however, Portugal is exploring new ways to attract people, such as the first regulations to offer visas to non-EU digital nomads. A way to get a young, educated population with income for isolated or even outermost regions, such as Madeira and the Azores.
Precisely because of the outermost, a particular case is the one exposed on the Canary Islands. In this case, we are talking about a region far from its continental reference territory and, in turn, has a centre and periphery effect between the different islands. Thus, the small islands, such as La Palma, El Hierro, La Gomera and Fuerteventura, lose services and population by leaps and bounds. The greatest bleeding occurs among young people, who must move to the two capital islands to study: two islands, Tenerife, and Gran Canaria, which, however, are densely populated.
Correcting insularity with fiscal and transport measures or private projects is a matter. El Hierro declared a Biosphere Reserve, has become a sustainable and self-sufficient space. In 2014, it became the first autonomous island in the world.
As a common framework for almost all cases of depopulation, we have learned in depth how climate change is developing, how attempts have been done to reverse it through a so-called just climate transition, and how we only have two realistic paths left: mitigating the effects, then not change them, and adapt to the new climate reality, both as people and by choosing more sustainable sectors. Very little homework has been done in this regard, only regarding energy efficiency.
With her session, the woman has also been the protagonist of this seminar. Since gender inequality, the speakers have agreed, increases in rural areas, attending to this double inequality is necessary. Even though much progress has been made in this regard in recent years, it is still essential to implement more services aimed at conciliation to promote the professional development of rural women and, above all, act in the field of gender violence, much more profound and longer in time in the rural area. It has been said several times in this seminar that women determine the population and, nevertheless, the one who emigrates the most from rural areas, 2 out of 3 expatriates. Without women, there will be no towns.
On the last day of presentations, we learned how non-profit organisations with public participation had been created in Portugal, the IPSS, which, in the interior of the country, the area hardest hit by depopulation, guarantees the provision and the approach of social services to large areas with few and dispersed populations. However, on many occasions, they have both financing and human resources problems.
In addition, regarding Spain, the scheme of Spanish cities was presented, with too many small municipalities that cannot provide quality social services. The excellent dispersion further exacerbates this, which means that, in practice, the constitutional guarantee of social services ultimately depends on where one lives.
Thus, in some places, shared services have been launched between supralocal organisations and associations, exemplified by Galicia. But these services must also be supported by good road and rail infrastructures, created and well maintained, so as not to isolate entire areas.
For all this, all the participating workers' organisations have agreed to draft and endorse a letter to all the competent Spanish central and autonomous governments, requesting, based on the conclusions of this seminar, the implementation of the necessary network of roads and ways to stop the depopulation of the northwest.
Finally, USO wants to collect and transfer a complaint of its own and the guests. USO understands that European aid for training workers, with the priority objective of the most vulnerable workers, should serve precisely to revitalise areas such as the one that has hosted this seminar: El Bierzo.
With the new transport conditions of the European Commission, which at no time consider these infrastructure and accessibility problems in the most unpopulated regions, the only thing that is achieved is that, like the rest of economic and private activities, it is forced to bet on large cities, connected and populated, as the venue for this type of seminar.
For this reason, we cannot help but close this seminar by stating that this move by the European Commission is yet another culprit for having to title the workshop like this: "The depopulation of the regions: a threat to equal opportunities."