Aproximació a la progressiva pèrdua d'activitats agràries al Barcelonès, al Baix Llobregat i al Maresme

Abstract

This article manifests the loss of agricultural lands and activities in three arcas of Catalonia Barcelonès, Baix Llobregat and Maresme since the beginning of this century. A loss which has come about due to an excessive and, in addition, anarchic urban and industrial growth in the above-mentioned districts.
The population actively engaged in agriculture in Barcelonès now represents 1 % of the total working population. This means that, in effect, the agricultural sector has disappeared from the area of production.
Obviously Barcelonès, with almost three million inhabitants, has much greater needs of food supply than before. Until a few decades ago, the 40's and 50's, a good part of these needs wer e covered by Barcelona's surrounding arces which were traditionally agrarian and agricultural Baix Llobregat and Maresme for instance. Since the 1960's, however, these arcas have diversified their productive functions and have begun to specialize in many other sectors. Tourism, second homes, urban residential belts, the proliferation of communication networks, centrifugal industrial expansion, die need for leisur e space, and so on, take over agricultural land (without discrimination between the good and the barely mediocre) in spite of the high cost of such land in the area around Barcelona.
The result of this situation brings about a practically irreversible process which, on occasions, breaks down and, on others, annihilates the agrarian structures of the district under study. This causes serious repercussions of an urban-demographic nature; for example: excessive density of population in arcas with a deplorable infrastructure. Other repercussions are of socioeconòmic nature (widespread situations of social strata suffering minimal econòmic conditions), ecological nature (many almost intolerable cases of pollution of the subsoil, topsoil, atmosphere and sea have occurred).