If this were not an article by WorldOfSoftware, if it were a novel by Michael Ende: the story would begin with a top-down shot of the Segrià fields. We would see farms and more farms, cereal fields, irrigated orchards, roads, the Segre winding through the plain. And, as we got closer to the ground, we would see a flood of little gray men with briefcases full of money.
The argument would be obvious: the field is for sale and the funds have gone out to Buy.
34 million pig heads. That is Spain: the undisputed leader of European pork, the third producer worldwide. A giant, no matter how hackneyed the metaphor may be, with feet of clay.
And the Spanish countryside has many problems, but the most worrying (because it has no solution — neither easy nor difficult) is its exasperating lack of generational change. Thousands of farms are on the verge of disappearance simply because no one wants to take charge of them once the owner retires.
And that “nobody” doesn’t include the funds? Not until very recently. Agriculture was an unsexy sector for financial capital, but now the situation has changed. We have seen it with agriculture: aggressive management of the countryside can generate a lot of income (even if it is at the cost of large negative externalities).
Now, in addition, today two great factors have joined the celebration of capital: the first is that the mass of exploitations without relief is enormous. The second is that the processes of integration of farms with the meat industry have reached a point of no return — “the field” and “the industry” are now almost synonymous.
A sea full of sharks. But, if that were not enough, the pressure on aquifers and international volatility are turning the agricultural world into a difficult place for small farms. Only large corporations have the lungs to dive into such tough markets.
Is this bad news? If we look at the Spanish movements from a more international perspective, I’m afraid so. The Californian case is a warning to sailors: large funds are buying properties solely and exclusively for their water rights. And that, as seen in the last drought, is a huge problem.
A problem that is added to environmental conflicts, to the capture of rents, to agricultural changes, to the industrial dismantling of emptied Spain.
A strange future. As I said before, Spain is the great agricultural power of the continent. In fact, little by little, it has become one of the great world powers in the marketing of agricultural products. But it will not be easy to continue there, financial funds are the best example and the problem is that everything seems to indicate that, along the way, the Spain we know will not be recognized by “not even the mother who gave birth to it.”
Imagen | Annie Spratt | Markus Winkler
In WorldOfSoftware | The great paradox of Spanish olive oil: although it grows 15% a year, more than 500 olive oil mills will close in the next decade
