1. Introduction
Following decades of enquiry into the causes of the supposed “backwardness” of Spanish agriculture [
1], historiography has in recent years focused on analyzing the contribution it makes to economic growth [
2,
3,
4]. The Spanish transition to industrial metabolism has accelerated since the 1960s. The increase of Domestic Material Consumption of and Domestic Material Extraction rates has been much higher than the surrounding countries [
5]. Spain’s agrarian production also grew at an annual rate of 2.3% during the period 1950–2000, higher than the average rate for the European Union (1.3%), and the total productivity of the different factors also grew at an annual rate of close to 2%, one of the highest levels on the continent. In the last decades, the trend has continued. While the EU’s agricultural production has not grown since the mid-1980s, Spain maintained an annual production growth of 1.29% to the beginning of the twentieth first century [
6]. Even the contribution made by the agrarian sector to other economic sectors seems to have been similarly positive, expressed through the decline of the real exchange rate, at least from the mid-1960s onwards [
6]. The agrarian sector has been integrated vertically into a broader economic structure that is responsible for the transformation and supply of foodstuffs, chiefly providing raw materials. This contribution is considered to be even more significant than the economic results achieved by the sector itself. The balance so far is, therefore, positive. However, this entire process of industrialization has brought about some very significant changes within the sector itself—economic, social and environmental—which cannot be considered in the same light [
7,
8].
The aim of this paper is to analyze what has happened from a biophysical perspective to ascertain whether such transformations have also been positive. The study is divided into the following sections: firstly, it examines the changes that have taken place with regard to eating habits, paying particularly close attention to diet. Secondly, it analyzes the way in which the agrarian sector has responded to these new demands, and the main transformations this has brought about in terms of agrarian production and inputs. To this end, we have integrated the results of a broader research project about different aspects of food production from a biophysical perspective in Spain, research conducted in recent years in the Agro-Ecosystems History Laboratory, applying methodologies pertaining to the Social Metabolism. These research findings have been published separately [
5,
9,
10,
11,
12]. The paper concludes with a discussion and conclusions that supplement the monetary interpretation, venturing certain hypotheses regarding the main drivers of the process of food industrialization and globalization in Spain.
2. Sources and Methods
To ascertain the main orientations of food demand, we have analyzed the changes that have taken place in the Spanish diet since the 1960s. This has been achieved by estimating total flows of biomass produced, appropriated and consumed within Spain between 1960 and 2008. This has allowed us to reconstruct the apparent consumption of food. Apparent consumption alludes to the quantity of biomass, both plant and animal, produced within Spain and used for human consumption, adding imports and deducting exports. In this respect, the methodology employed shares some of the assumptions used by the FAO [
13] to construct its food balance sheets. However, the metabolic methodology offers a biophysical perspective of changes that are not captured by the FAO methodology. For example, the metabolic methodology takes into account all the biomass produced in agro-ecosystems, both above and below ground, as well as dry matter, something that the FAO’s methodology does not, since it was constructed for a different purpose. We have deducted the proportion of production allocated to seeds and other uses (fundamentally animal feed but also industrial uses), and we have also deducted the inedible part of foods (pips, peels, and stones). Unlike the FAO food balances, which provide annual food consumption data, our data represent five-year averages and do not take into account variations in stock.
Furthermore, our data reflect apparent food consumption, rather than “real consumption”, which is given in the “Survey of Family Budgets” published by Spain’s National Institute of Statistics (INE) from 1958 onwards. In addition, these surveys do not always include consumption outside the home, which accounted for 32.3% of aggregated food consumption in Spain in 2015 [
14]. This and other factors (accountability of consumption in public institutions, evaluation of losses in the food chain, etc.) might explain the significant difference that exists between these sources and our apparent consumption data in terms of the annual per capita consumption figures. Since our aim is not to assess the nutritional content of diet, but rather the transformation experienced by the agrarian sector, we are particularly interested in “gross” quantities of foods destined to human consumption directly or indirectly, through livestock. Consequently, the metabolic methodology is the most suitable and coherent approach to take when working towards this goal, bearing in mind that it ensures the required coherence in the data and in their elaboration.
The food balance series published annually by the FAO since 1961 offer percentages of losses per product throughout the food chain, but not for those losses produced within the home and in other food consumption activities outside the home. For these types of losses, we only have current information. The most recent and complete study about this subject was carried out for the FAO by the Swedish Food and Biotechnology Institute [
15]. It compiles information about losses for the five major processes (production, handling and storage post-harvest, processing and packaging, distribution and consumption), and seven geographical areas. The results show a percentage of losses in consumption that is much greater in industrialized than non-industrialized countries. These types of losses are difficult to estimate for the past. Consequently, when calculating losses in consumption, we have assumed the current European value for the years 2000 and 2008, whereas for the previous years, we have extrapolated values taking a linear approach up to 1960, assuming that in that year the percentages of losses would be similar to those found today in Southeast Asia.
Data on apparent consumption have been taken from a much broader study conducted into the metabolism of Spanish agriculture [
11] based on Economy-Wide Material Flow Accounting (EW-MFA). This is a well-known methodology that has, however, had to be adapted to the specificities of the agrarian sector. For example, the standard methodology considers part of the products in terms of fresh matter and another part (fundamentally fodder and forage plants) in terms of dry matter [
16], adding different weights together. We have chosen to consider all the types of biomass in terms of dry matter, an approach usually taken in specific studies about biomass to avoid the distortions produced by the varying water content values of the different types of biomass, above all, pasture and crops (between 15% and 95%) [
17,
18].
The EW-MFA methodology provides high quality information about all the biomass extracted in the country, but we also included all the biomass produced, in other words, the actual Net Primary Productivity (NPPact) of Spanish agroecosystems and the different categories they encompass, as described below. Among these are the proportions of biomass that are destined for human consumption, either directly or indirectly, through livestock. This methodology distinguishes between the domestic extraction (DE) and domestic consumption (DC) of biomass. This latter element is the result of adding imports from third party countries and subtracting exports from DE. Consequently, DC enables the apparent consumption of human food and the cost of animal feed in terms of biomass to be reconstructed, taking into account the net foreign trade balance.
The sources used to calculate biomass extraction were the statistics provided by the Spanish government, with different degrees of quality and regularity between 1960 and 2008 (most of these publications are available online:
http://www.magrama.gob.es/es/estadistica/temas/publicaciones/anuario-de-estadistica/). We have reconstructed the evolution of actual Net Primary Productivity (NPP
act) based on the construction of six points in time between 1960 and 2008, employing five-year averages. The methodology utilized for these calculations is set out in Guzmán et al. [
19] and explained in Guzmán Casado and González de Molina [
12] and Soto et al. [
11]. For the calculation of livestock production, we have used data about meat and milk productions available in Spain’s Agrarian Statistics Yearbooks [
20]. As for inputs, we have mainly used the same Yearbooks, which offer data about the consumption of each type of fertilizer in terms of nutrients, the installed power of farming machinery, the land area covered by greenhouses and other protected crops, and the consumption of pesticides. For electricity and fuel, the data from the yearbooks have been supplemented with figures from FAOSTAT. Land area data for each type of irrigation have been taken from Calatayud and Martínez-Carrión [
21], MAPA [
7] and MAGRAMA [
22].
4. Discussion
In the 1960s, the Spanish population still largely consumed a Mediterranean diet, which was the result of adapting production to the conditions and dynamics of Spain’s agro-ecosystems [
25]. However, from that decade onwards, the country gradually adopted food consumption patterns typical of developed countries [
35], increasingly removed from WHO recommendations [
36,
37], a phenomenon known as diet “Westernization” [
38]. Del Pozo de la Calle et al. [
39] calculated the Mediterranean Diet Score (MDS), noting that in 2008 Spain obtained a score of 4, on a scale from 0 to 9, where this latter value signifies maximum adherence to the Mediterranean diet. These habits are responsible for the fact that 60.9% of the Spanish population is overweight (39.3%) or obese (21.6%) [
40] and are associated with degenerative diseases [
41] such as colon-rectal cancer [
42]. A diet based on the high consumption of livestock products, on the excessive intake of animal proteins and fats, and on the increasing absence of carbohydrates.
This has increased above all the demand for meat, dairy products and eggs, which in turn have sparked a fundamental change in the productive orientation of the agrarian sector: since the 1960s, and markedly in recent decades, production has been largely geared towards animal feed, in other words, towards livestock uses. In effect, the Spanish agrarian sector reacted between 1960 and 2008 by means of a spectacular growth of livestock numbers, the mass introduction of inputs, focusing the extraction of biomass in cropland areas, and paradoxically, through the relative abandonment of pasture and scrublands. However, these changes in food demand have only been partially met through domestic production. The increase in livestock numbers and changes in their composition, where monogastric animals have become extremely important, has been made possible by growing imports of biomass for animal feed from other countries in the European Union and Latin America [
9]. Foreign trade is, therefore, a key element in Spain’s agri-food system: on the one hand, it enables the productive specialization of Spanish agriculture (in oil and horticultural products) to have an outlet in international markets, especially European ones, while, on the other hand, it allows the growing consumption of meat and dairy observed in the Spanish population to be sustained, providing a very important percentage of animal feed (
Figure 1a). This phenomenon is coherent with the data obtained from research about the evolution of the nitrogen cycle in Spain between 1961 and 2010, which has shown the growing dependence of Spanish livestock on imported protein, particularly from Latin America [
43,
44].
In short, today, the consumption of biomass in Spain largely depends on imports. It currently accounts for a considerable percentage, 27.6%, of NPP, much higher than the global average (12% [
45]), but one part in reality is extracted in other countries, bearing in mind that DE accounts for 21.8% of NPP produced by Spanish agroecosystems [
11]. The globalization of the Spanish agroecosystem has allowed the pressure on land caused by the increase in the domestic consumption of biomass to be outsourced to other countries. This does not mean that pressure on land has diminished absolute terms, or that the health of the country’s agroecosystems has improved. All of these transformations have had a serious impact on Spanish agro-ecosystems.
Firstly, the growing incorporation of external inputs alters the relationship between input and output flows of energy, decreasing the energy efficiency of Spanish agriculture [
12,
46]. Secondly, intensification and specialization has contributed to lowering the density of internal energy loops (biomass). The relative decline of un-harvested biomass in croplands has exacerbated the degradation of the soil and biodiversity [
46,
47]. The replenishment of organic carbon in the soil between 1960 and 1990 fell. Even between 1990 and 2008, the sharp increase in internal and external flows of biomass for animal feed barely contributed to increasing soil organic carbon (SOC) due to the fact that these flows had an increasingly lower C:N ratio for the largest proportion of monogastric and ruminant animals, as noted previously [
47]. This helps to explain why half of all agricultural land in Spain currently has an organic carbon content of less than 1% [
48]. Moreover, the availability of phytomass is necessary to sustain complex food chains of heterotrophic species. The relative decrease in unharvested biomass on cropland negatively affects biodiversity [
46,
47]. Other factors, such as the use of biocides and the destruction of the diverse territorial matrix, typical of traditional agriculture, are also responsible for the decline of biodiversity in Spanish agroecosystems [
49,
50]. Thirdly, the massive importation of N in feed and mineral fertilizers (553 and 1150 Gg in 2000, respectively) increased the surplus and the losses of N, which in turn pollute water resources and could have a negative impact on biodiversity [
43,
46]. Finally, the increase in erosion rates [
51,
52] and the salinization and overexploitation of water resources [
53] have gone hand in hand with the intensification and specialization of Spanish agriculture from 1960 to the present day.
Our provisional results for the GHG emissions balance of food production in Spain [
54] indicate that GHG emissions have risen considerably, increasing four-fold between 1960 and 2008. This growth is associated with the increase in industrial inputs and animal feed, the production of which generates changes in land uses in the countries of origin, as well as emissions derived from the cultivation of soy or corn, for example, both directly and indirectly. Furthermore, the increase in livestock numbers has pushed up emissions of enteric methane and manure management. In any case, emissions in the agricultural sector, and above all the livestock sector, have become one of the most relevant sources of emissions in the Spanish economy [
54].
The drivers behind this “major transformation” of the agro-ecosystem have been very diverse. In terms of supply, the struggle against declining agrarian revenues [
55], through the increase in land and labor productivity [
4], have led to productive specialization and intensification on croplands, and to the abandonment of non-irrigated lands further inland, with low productivity levels, and extensive livestock farming, on account of low profitability. Indeed, between 1960 and 2009, the number of farms in existence fell by two-thirds, and the rural population declined from 14.89 million to 5.97 million, from almost half the Spanish population to just 12.76% [
56,
57]. The active agrarian population has fallen from 4.70 million to just over 800,000, representing just over 4% of employed workers. Agricultural land area dropped from 20.4 million to 17.2 (
Table 4). Similarly, livestock has undergone an acute process of concentration of farms, the industrialization of its production processes [
30,
58,
59,
60] and the vertical integration of the agri-food industry, increasing supply and reducing the final product price. Pigs and poultry are a good example of this fundamental transformation [
61,
62,
63,
64,
65].
In terms of demand, the relationship between an increase in per capita income and an increase in the energy and animal protein content of the diet has been well documented [
35] (for a review, see [
41]). This has certainly occurred in Spain, facilitated by falling food prices [
38] and the declining importance of food expenses in family budgets, which fell from 48.7% in 1960 to 16.8% in 2015 [
66]. However, the increase in income only explains the increase in the consumption of meat and dairy products and the progressive distancing from the Mediterranean diet. It does not explain, however, why this increase in meat has been based on monogastric livestock, depending on imported quality grains and not on pasture or harvest by-products.
Figure 6 compares changes in the prices paid by consumers for pork and chicken and other animal origin foodstuffs, with changes in a selected group of basic vegetable foodstuffs. It shows how animal origin foods have become progressively cheaper, whereas vegetables have become increasingly more expensive. This explains how pork and chicken, eggs, milk and yoghurts have become as affordable for consumers as bread, cereals, legumes, fruit and vegetables. Of particular note has been the declining price of pork, owing to the economies of scale of intensive farms that are increasingly concentrated, and the importation of cheap grain (corn and soy), which has brought down the end price of this type of meat. In 2015, Spain even became the EU’s leading exporter of pork [
67].
As we have seen, the globalization of food markets has turned Spain into a net importer of biomass, favored by comparatively lower prices of agricultural commodities (soy, corn, etc.) in international markets, which are the bases of intensively farmed livestock feed [
69,
70]. What has actually occurred has been an outsourcing of part of the land consumed by the Spanish agri-food system to third party countries, with lower production costs. Imports of soybeans and corn for feed amounted to almost 2 million hectares in 2008, i.e. 11.6% of Spanish Cropland, using the average yields of the main countries of origin (Brazil, Argentina, and USA). In 1960, it was only 0.6%.
5. Conclusions
According to economic historiography, the Spanish agrarian sector has contributed positively to Spain’s economic development. However, the industrialization of Spanish agriculture has brought about profound changes in land uses and in the functionality of the biomass produced, increasing pressure on croplands and, paradoxically, facilitating the abandonment of an important proportion of pasture and croplands. This has led to an orientation towards livestock in Spain’s agrarian sector, in other words, the subordination of a very significant portion of Spanish agroecosystems to the food demands of intensive livestock farming. The industrialization of agriculture and livestock farming is leading to the deterioration of the environmental quality of agro-ecosystems. As we have seen, this process has been based on the injection of large quantities of external energy, on the destruction of employment and on the declining profitability of agrarian activity.
Agricultural production has indeed undergone significant growth since the 1960s, increasing food supply and even turning Spain into a major exporter of agri-food products, but this has been insufficient to deal with the growing demand created by the change in the Spanish diet and the increasing trend to focus on livestock farming. The process of globalization has allowed both roles to be reconciled, although in recent decades Spain has accentuated its role as a net importer of biomass from a biophysical perspective, with very significant impacts on third party countries, particularly in Latin America. Consequently, it cannot be said that the industrialization of Spanish agriculture has been an entirely successful process, without taking into account the social and environmental costs it has brought to bear.