Abstract

GUIRADO, Carles; TULLA, Antoni; VALLDEPERAS, Natalia  and  VERA, Ana. Social Farming in Catalonia: an alternative of local sustainable development against the economic and social crisis. GOT [online]. 2017, n.11, pp.189-213. ISSN 2182-1267.  https://doi.org/10.17127/got/2017.11.009.

Commercial agriculture has sought the maximum yield of production, which has led to very profound changes in farms and throughout the European countryside. Because of the so-called "Green Revolution" many territories have been marginalized and depopulated. The economic diversification of the rural world since 1980s has driven to multifunctionality with the incorporation of the tourism activities and the generation of added value in agricultural products. In parallel the price has raised among consumers for organic farming and proximity, a fact that is increasingly shared by the peasantry. Since 2008, the global economic crisis has aggravated the situation of an important part of population. On the one hand, more low-quality food with a lofty energetic cost appears in the global food system. And on the other hand, this fact and the lack of work bring many young people to seek economic opportunities in the countryside, promoting new products based on ecological criteria and marketed in local food networks. In this scenario, Social Farming (SF) proposes the production and transformation of agricultural products involving direct social benefits in terms of occupation, training, therapy or rehabilitation of groups at risk of social exclusion. Social and public investment in four areas: (a) social cohesion; (b) the empowerment of socially vulnerable groups; (c) local development in the rural and periurban world; and (d) a more well-adjusted balance between revenues and costs for society. In this paper we present the Catalonia case through the diagnosis of the sector in this territory and the analysis of a selection of study cases.

Keywords : Social Farming; Catalonia; Sustainable local development; Social exclusion; Rural Multifunctionality.

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