This year the International Mountain Day under the motto: «Promoting mountain products to improve livelihoods«, attempts are made to boost local economies from mountain populations through the marketing of their limited productions but whose main value lies in their excellent quality and high value. 131% of the world's population lives in mountain areas, with a third of that same percentage being vulnerable due to their situation of inequality due to historical, economic, cultural, political and biological factors compared to the rest of the population.
Mountain populations are almost always linked to agricultural activities where the family group plays a major role. With limited technical means and production conditions conditioned by the extreme environments in which they live. These conditions have led them to develop a life of subsistence perfected by the experience of generations, and based on the specialization of unique products adapted to the environment.
The quality of these limited productions from specific mountain areas has sparked high global commercial interest within the fair trade or high quality markets due to their naturalness.
International Mountain Day is an opportunity to raise awareness in Cantabria Since the debate on the disastrous regional, national and European policy, the personality of the local communities of the mountains and highlands has been promoted. Producing from the offices packages of legal measures that have not achieved an integral development of these areas of our Community, with actions that have had little popular participation but to which many mayors have yielded in the face of vain solutions, accepting any investment even when in the long run what has been produced have been other negative scenarios.
The lack of a culture of the territory, of an ordered regional territorial framework after 25 years of having full powers over the instruments of territorial and urban planning and management, it is not surprising that on the horizon of the new century we see our mountain areas endangered by a lack of protection of the diversity of our spaces, natural or not, against threats such as coastal real estate colonialism or hydraulic fracturing (fracking).
The rest of the population who do not live in mountain areas but who often enjoy visiting them or simply contemplating their beauty, must understand that this "natural" state brings with it economic and existential difficulties for those who live there. Society as a whole cannot deny the help and attention that these communities and their environment need; because abandoning them also means losing our future, it means impoverishing us all.
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