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Formentera Farmers' Cooperative industrial space operative this summer

nau coop1Jaume Ferrer, president of the Formentera Council, and Santi Juan, the administration's councillor in charge of infrastructure, agriculture, livestock and fishing, were joined this morning by both the president and head of operations at the Cooperativa del Camp de Formentera ('Formentera Farmers' Collective'), Jaume Escandell and Carlos Marí, for an act of ceremony that signalled the eminent opening of a space for the cooperative. The symbolic placement of the first stone was a thrilling moment of progress in the endeavour to bestow the Farmers' Cooperative with a functional and multipurpose warehouse space. The 590,000-euro project – a third of which is being financed by the Leader programme with the other two thirds footed by the Council itself – is expected to be complete by June. Construction will be overseen by the Tragsa company.

The construction of the industrial space comes as part of a long-running effort by the FiC office of agriculture to revitalise Formentera's countryside. So far, successful efforts have included the fusion last summer of the island's different farmers' groups into one single cooperativa del camp, and the fons de terres ('untilled land use') project, backed by the Council and the Farmers' Cooperative as a way to put unused land to use for productive agriculture and recover natural beauty on the island.

Jaume Ferrer declared: “The first stone of the industrial space represents the beginning of an extremely ambitious project of the Council, Cooperative and local population to reactivate and restore the beauty of our countryside”.

The FiC president affirmed he was excited to take part in a day of such great importance for Formentera's rural population. The Cooperativa del Camp's 500-sq.-m. locale was conceived as an open warehouse to give the cooperative a place to store tools and harvested fruits and vegetables. It will also include office space to house the collective's administrative services, until now located in an office on loan from the Formentera Council at Centre Gabrielet, next to the farmers' market.