The Catalan TV shocked the pork sector with a documentary work reporting the huge meat production in our country. Under the suggestive title of Porca Misèria, the authors of the documentary made a piece many called partial and tendentious. It is true that this work ignores the great complexity of the pig sector, but it starts from a reality on which everyone agrees: production is at nearly over the limit. The farm map is literally saturated in Catalonia, both as a result of a rapid increase during the last decades (attracted by juicy economic benefits), and due to environmental regulations that increasingly restrict the proliferation of new farms. The situation is now causing a change in the productive map of our country, favoring the concentration of farms (increasingly larger and more profitable) in a few hands. Family farms, the ones of a lifetime, those that historically helped farmers to survive, are disappearing little by little and being sold to the big meat companies. The lack of generational relief and the imposition of a market that demands mechanized and intensive production are only favoring multinationals and investment groups and relegating the rancher to being a simple laborer.
This is the harsh reality that the Catalan countryside is offering, not only in the pig sector, but in general in the food sector. International markets, drought, rising costs and (again) the lack of relief are causing the countryside to pour into latifundism and, consequently, the change of a landscape which is then causing events such as floods and floods experienced in Ponent at the beginning of September.
In the name of a food sovereignty that in our country is sick and the preservation of a sustainable production model, both for the environment and for the middle classes, it would be necessary for the administration to intervene and order the imbalances of the Catalan agri-food sector. And this should happen before a point of no return is reached, before the small ranchers or farmers are completely extinct, the only ones capable of preserving a more balanced model, which curbs the intrusion of large land-owning companies or multinational investment groups willing to impose their unbridled reality.
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