(Un)sustainabilities in a Viticulture Region (El Penedès): Market Economy, Public Policies, and Territorial Model

Abstract

El Penedès is a traditional viticulture area, and this activity has been essential to the region's economic development and the construction of its identity. Throughout the last three centuries, family and subsistence farming became a market-oriented economy, characterized by significant mechanization, grape monocultures, and dependence on chemical inputs. Small-scale agriculture therefore shifted from being the centre of household economies to a job or a supplementary source of income for a small number of family members. In the summer of 2019, grape prices dropped to levels that jeopardized the sustainability of many small farms, whose final selling prices were not even sufficient to cover production costs. In this context, I have observed through two years of fieldwork (participant observation and interviews) how the viticulture sector suffers aggressive intrusion by agribusiness, positioning farmers at the confluence of a market economy monopolized by three large companies, regulation at different scales that has proved inefficient in ensuring the sustainability of small-scale agriculture, and a territorial model that reallocates agricultural land to logistics infrastructure. This article concludes that despite farmers' demands for just prices to ensure economic viability and dignity, the sustainability of small farms is effectively under threat today in El Penedès. Indeed, farmers are entangled in a capitalist moral economy that impedes the possibility of imagining real non-exploitative socioeconomic relations and thereby reproduces and reinforces existing patterns of capital accumulation.