Fundamental to guarantee resources for rural production and the conservation of forests and wetlands: Claudia Sheinbaum

• An initiative will be sent to the local Congress to eliminate the term “rural land” from the Political Constitution of Mexico City and only leave “conservation land.”
• In the current administration, the budget for conservation land was increased five times. 4 thousand 100 million pesos have been allocated.

Mexico City, December 19, 2022.- This Monday afternoon, at the Museum of Mexico City, the Head of Government of Mexico City, Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo met with agrarian groups from the country’s capital, with whom it signed an environmental policy coordination agreement on conservation land to continue protecting it jointly.

“Conservation land represents something very important for the city, for the country and for the planet. First, because it is estimated that 2% of the planet’s biodiversity is represented on conservation land and, in addition, environmental services are produced there, perhaps the most important being the recharge of aquifers, if the forests of the region did not exist. city, because no water would reach the aquifers,” he explained.

He pointed out that a Territorial Ordinance that was prepared by the Planning Institute was recently put to consultation, there, something that comes in the Constitution of Mexico City approved in 2017 is established.

“It was established in one of the articles that there is not only conservation land, but also divides conservation land into rural land and conservation land”, which has generated a lot of confusion in the Territorial Planning”.

Therefore, an initiative will be sent to the local Congress to eliminate the term “rural land” from the Political Constitution of Mexico City and only leave “conservation land.”

Likewise, Claudia Sheinbaum proposed that it be established in the Constitution of Mexico City: that resources must always be granted to conservation land, that it does not depend on the will or interest of the next head of government, but rather that the current one be established amount, which is one thousand 100 million pesos, plus inflation for each year.

The head of government Claudia Sheinbaum endorsed her commitment to the agrarian nuclei and to grant more resources to conservation land. “Next year it was established in the Expenditure Budget 1,100 million, it would be necessary to increase what corresponds to inflation and thus, by 2024, while we are here,” she said.

Claudia Sheinbaum recalled that when she was Secretary of the Environment, resources were granted for the first time to conservation land, close to 43 million pesos, a budget that did not increase until the current administration in charge.

“When we came to the government, we made the decision to multiply that resource by five. So in 2019, for the first time, conservation land received one billion pesos; that, if we add from 2019 to date, in the four years that we have been in charge of the government, there are 4 thousand 100 million pesos that have been given to producers, to brigades for forest conservation, for reforestation, for attention of forest fires and for agricultural production” he highlighted.

Finally, he urged the sector to continue conserving, procuring and establishing work groups to attend to problems, both of production, of new forms of production, more agroecological; and also substitution of some crops, support for the production of corn, for the milpa; the rescue of the Xochimilco canals and the entire wetland area, as well as the Tláhuac irrigation area.

Conservation land represents half of the city’s territory, 88 thousand hectares, there are 42 agricultural nuclei that represent around 80% of the conservation land surface. “In other words, the conservation land continues to be and we want it to continue to be mainly social property.”