SPANISH AGRICULTURE
Agriculture in Spain is having a hard time – not least because Spanish farmers are having trouble competing against Third World countries. Basic costs in Spain have rocketed over the past twenty years and yet the prices for produce have not increased significantly for Spanish farmers. This means that they are having a hard time, to put it mildly.
The difference between the past and now is very well illustrated by oranges. Years ago these were almost exclusively farmed in Spain within the Valencia area and represented a lucrative business. Indeed, forty years ago a Spanish farmer with around 20 hanegadas (around 16,620 m2) of land would have been a wealthy man. Certainly, he would not have needed to have soiled his hands – having more than enough money to employ people to do all the hard work whilst he was living a comfortable life.
According to a Spanish friend of mine, whose family has had orange groves in Valencia for generations there was a measurement called an aroba (much the same as an @!) which was a measurement of weight. An aroba amounted to 13 kilos of oranges and was worth, by chance, more or less the same as a man’s labour for a day.
A hanegada (831 m2) of productive orange groves could produce 200 arobas of Valencian oranges a year – depending, of course, upon the weather. So, the produce of a single hanagada was equivalent to employing a labourer for around 200 days. In short, in times past, Spanish oranges were worth good money and were an excellent income producer.
However, now the situation has changed radically. Labour costs for labour in Spain can ba as little as 50 Euros a day – but guess what a farmer will get paid for an aroba of Valencia oranges now?
Well, an aroba of Valencian oranges will yield some 1 – 10 euros (an average of 3-5 euros) for a farmer depending upon the type of oranges. This is nothing like 50 euros nor does it relate in any way to the cost of a labourer for a day forty years ago.
You may, of course, think that the Spanish farmers of Valencian oranges were overpaid in the past. But that does not take away from the fact that now it is barely economic for them to farm their oranges, despite it being a crop that, years ago, was so valuable.
Oranges are something of an extreme when it comes to illustrating the problems of agriculture in Spain but, more or less, are indicative of the huge economic changes that have occurred in Spain over the past few generations. Unfortunately, whilst these changes have bettered Spain and brought it into the First World, they have made the cost of living (and the cost of labour) far more expensive than it was.
Certainly, Spain is no longer the European country with the cheapest workforce by far in Europe– something that attracted industry from Northern Europe (and the US) from the 1960s to the late 1980s. Meanwhile, globalization means that Spanish farmers have the dilemma of how to compete with the agricultural industries of Third World countries – that retain the same labour and living costs that Spain had so long ago.
Is there a solution?
Frankly, I suspect not – anymore than there is any real possibility of the UK ever again competing with China or India to mass manufacture goods. Times have moved on and with them the basic costs of living and labour consistent with life in the First World.
Still, as someone who cares for the land and has a natural sympathy for farmers, I feel saddened for Spanish farmers and troubled for the long term viability of Spanish agriculture. After all it is one thing to produce terrific quality and quite another to compete on price – seemingly the factor that most consumers value above all others…
Nick Snelling – Culture Spain
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