Cambio técnico y medioambiental en España: ¿atraso agrario o «dragón europeo»?

Abstract

The pejorative view on Spanish agriculture, the main source of employment until 1950, has been one of the constants in the socioeconomic analysis until the end of the last century. It became one of the topics that fueled the idea of Hispanic inferiority, to which contributed writers like Joaquín Costa. The renewal of the agrarian history has corrected the image of social and economic backwardness in two ways: a better knowledge of the processes of technical innovation and the opening to the concept of environmental and biological limits of Spanish farming. This serves to draw attention to the dangers of productivism. This concept can be now use as argument, but we must take in account that Franco destroyed and refocused the innovation systems and eliminated the chances of the way peasant, that the Republican land reform would have made it possible.