De la expansión al declive de la uva de Almería (Siglos XIX y XX)Modelos de organización productiva y comercial de un cultivo de exportación

Resumo

The objective of this doctoral Tthesis is to analyze different issues within the grape sector of the province of Almería, a crop that, throughout almost two centuries, has been an important source of provincial resources. In the first chapter we will focus on carrying out a contextualization and brief review of its history, in addition to influencing the transformational nature that it had, not only in the agricultural structure, but in the landscape of the territory where it was settled. In chapter two we will deal with analyzing the development of the table grape business since its inception, paying special attention to the peculiarities of the crop (since it was a crop with an export vocation), marketing systems and attempts to organize it to regulate the supply at origin. The third chapter has been dedicated to making an approximation to the role that women developed in tasks of the cycle, being an essential labor factor in cleaning and packaging tasks and paying attention to the existing wage inequality. The financing of the sector has been collected in the fourth chapter, since the crop required a strong initial investment for the adaptation of the land and the facilities of the structure on which the plants would settle once they grew; but also annual investments to develop the campaign. Next, in the fifth chapter, we focus on studying the reconstruction of the business from the forties of the 20th century, in autarchic Spain; evolution of commercialization according to destination markets is analyzed, changes in the inputs required, important logistical changes that caused the bulk of exports to be produced by land instead of by maritime and, especially relevant, the deterioration of profitability of the crop together with the increase of wages in the field. In the last chapter, in the sixth, the table grape sector is contextualized within the framework of agri-food trade in the second globalization and a decline model is proposed through the different factors that converged from the 1960s until the 20th century and which led to the virtual disappearance of commercial exploitations of table grapes of the Ohanes variety in the province of Almería towards the end of the 1990s. Finally we collect the conclusions of each of the chapters described here synthetically.