Nature and Socio-Territorial Transformations of the New Agro-Industrial Regions: San Francisco Valley (Brazil) and Region of Murcia (Spain)

Abstract

This article proposes a sociological approach to the enclaves of fruit and vegetable production for global markets, considering their specific logic of social production of space and nature. The aim of the research is to integrate nature into the problems of the sociology of agriculture when studying the social organisation of labour and production in intensive agricultural enclaves. To this end, we have selected two case studies to illustrate these processes empirically: i) the Petrolina-Juazeiro fruit-growing area (Brazil) located in the sub-middle irrigated valley of the San Francisco river in the ‘sertao’ area in the Brazilian Northeast and specialised in tropical and subtropical fruit crops (mainly grapes and mangoes) concentrated in a few large exporting companies; and ii) the fruit and vegetable enclave of the Region of Murcia (Spain) as a productive enclave of intensive agriculture located on the Spanish Mediterranean coast and specialised in horticultural (lettuce, tomato and others) and fruit (table grapes and stone fruit) crops for export, driven by medium and small farmers organised in cooperatives, as well as by large companies with local and/or international capital. It is proposed to understand the enclaves of intensive agriculture as a historical nature shaped by a particular ‘ideology of nature’, from which agro-industrial capital exploits the historically specific form of nature, in that it brings its conditions of possibility to the value relation through capitalisation and appropriation.