| Popis: |
The main social fund element (agricultural population) emits a work flow that is measurable in terms of energy. It also originates an integrated information flow that supports the structure and functioning of the agroecosystem. This flow is generated by households, whose “reproduction” is not only of a biological nature: it also relies on economic costs that have varied over time. To what extent Spanish agriculture was able to sustain its agricultural population during the twentieth century and what impact it had on other fund elements? The answer to these questions is the main argument of this chapter. The chapter examines the evolution of the agricultural population, changes of their living standards, household economy, and farms structure, all of them edges of the social fund. Farmers got insufficient income to sustain and reproduce their household and, as consequences, they were driven to search for higher incomes by specializing in crops with the most profitable market outlets or by intensifying production. This chapter revealed that: i) there was an unequal distribution of income among farmers, mainly due to farm size and the sustained decline in the price of agricultural products, and ii) the productive intensification and specialization became a common strategy for all farmers, regardless of their size. In this chapter, we conclude that the processes of industrialization and subsequent globalization have significantly decreased the weight of the agricultural population fund element at the expense of increasing the size of the technical means of production, resulting in a threatens not only the environmental health of agroecosystems but also the viability of agricultural activity as we know it today. |
