The agricultural entities Unió de Pagesos, Jarc, and Asaja appeared before a commission in the Parliament to request a revaccination plan for contagious nodular dermatosis (DNC) for 2026. This request follows a new positive case that forced restrictions on several Catalan farms. The organizations lamented the Generalitat's "lack of prevention" given the presence of the disease in France.
“"The suffering could have been avoided if prevention had worked."
The national coordinator of Unió de Pagesos, Raquel Serrat, criticized the prevention department of the Ministry of Agriculture and demanded an audit of the livestock health service. She also requested the creation of an independent appraisal body to assess sacrificed animals before sanitary culls, stating that the disease entered through insects present in the Aiguamolls de l'Empordà wetlands.
The president of Jarc, Joan Carles Massot, stressed that preventive vaccination "is not mandatory but necessary" and asked to relax the technical criteria for the entry of animals into farms. Meanwhile, the president of Asaja, Pere Roqué, argued that the dermatosis is not the farmers' fault, but rather the management of game fauna, and called for the cleaning of riverbeds and ponds to control the contagion vector.
This request comes after the Generalitat paid 1.5 million euros last week in compensation to farmers affected by DNC. This payment completed the compensation for mandatory sanitary culls applied to farms in Cassà de la Selva and Castelló d'Empúries. The total amount allocated to compensate for damages amounts to 6.3 million euros.
