ReportageWith 58 million pigs sent to the slaughterhouse in 2021, the country has dethroned Germany as Europe’s leading producer. Based on increasingly large factories, its agro-industrial model is highly controversial.
100 kilometers northwest of Madrid, vast fields of bright green cereals stretch as far as the eye can see, punctuated by small villages with ocher houses, medieval monasteries and old isolated chapels along the roads. The landscape of the Segovian countryside is bucolic. The air, on the other hand, regularly transports the pestilential emanations emanating from manure pits and manure spreading. This province of Castile and Leon has nearly 750 pig farms. Three times more than the number of municipalities. And if nearly 150,000 people live in this territory plagued by desertification, the pigs themselves number 1.3 million.
« We are surrounded by villages classified as vulnerable to nitrates and, despite everything, the local authorities continue to distribute permits to this type of farm », laments Lauro Salgado, his hands sunk in the ground, planting tomatoes in his ecological vegetable garden in Santa Maria la Real de Nieva. The sun has carved furrows on the tanned skin of the skinny face of this organic farmer. Concerns, no doubt, too. « The smell is terrible and the water is increasingly polluted, even at 120 meters deep »continues the 50-year-old, member of the citizen platform Future own Segovian countryside (Futuro limpio campina segoviana).
Created in 2021, like others in some provinces of Spain, to protest against plans to expand and build pig factories, the platform is fighting to obtain, at least, a three-year moratorium on future “macrofarms” of pigs, as was the case in Castilla-La Mancha, or the prohibition of new pig farms in municipalities polluted with nitrates, as Catalonia has decreed for 68 municipalities. On the contrary, almost 160 of these meat plants have been approved in five years in Castile and Leon, and another 80 projects are in the development phase. And the recent appointment of a far-right regional agriculture minister, in favor of intensive livestock farming, is not likely to reassure environmentalists.
Fewer farms, more pigs
“Elsewhere, it seems that there is a change of paradigm and that the preservation of the environment is progressing: in Germany, in the Netherlands, in Belgium, the production of pigs is falling. It’s the opposite here. », regrets Mr. Salgado. With 58.5 million pigs taken to slaughterhouses in 2021 (+ 4.2%), Spain has become the leading pork producer in Europe, ahead of Germany (56.2 million), which counts almost twice more inhabitants. No wonder, since 60% of Spanish production is exported: mainly to China (1.3 million tonnes), where African swine fever has been raging since 2018, then to France (300,000 tonnes).
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