The water footprint of the spanish agricultural sector: 1860-2010

Rosa Duarte, Vicente Pinilla and Ana Serrano

Documentos de Trabajo de la Sociedad de Estudios de Historia Agraria from Sociedad de Estudios de Historia Agraria

Abstract: From 1860 the Spanish agricultural sector has gone through an intensive process of development resulting in important structural changes, not only in the sector itself, but also regarding the relationship of the agrarian system with natural resources. These changes were closely related to the growing per capita income in the long term, an increasing degree of integration in international markets and profound political changes. During the last 150 years, the volume of Spanish agricultural production experienced a great increase, notably affecting the consumption of domestic water resources and entailing the need for the construction of waterworks, key for the development of irrigation. In this context, this paper studies the evolution of domestic water consumption as a consequence of the increasing agricultural production, as well as the impact that the growing needs for water had on the construction of infrastructure for irrigation. To that aim, we estimate the water footprint of the Spanish agricultural sector, that is, we will try to obtain the water consumed in the production of vegetal and animal goods for five different years: 1860, 1900, 1930, 1962 and 2010. From these results, a detailed analysis of the trends on water consumption and changes in compositional patterns is carried out. Moreover, we collect the available information on the building of new irrigation infrastructure to examine to what extent the development of the agricultural sector conditioned the construction of new irrigation infrastructure. Finally, a Decomposition Analysis (DA) is applied to analytically identify and quantify the main explaining factors behind the evolution followed by the increase in agricultural water consumption in the long term.

Keywords: agricultural production; water footprint; irrigation; decomposition analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: N53 N54 Q10 Q25 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 41 pages
Date: 2014-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr and nep-his
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (13)

Downloads: (external link)
http://repositori.uji.es/xmlui/bitstream/handle/10 ... 01408.pdf?sequence=1 (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not found (http://repositori.uji.es/xmlui/bitstream/handle/10234/96975/DT-SEHA%201408.pdf?sequence=1 [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://repositori.uji.es/xmlui/bitstream/handle/10234/96975/DT-SEHA%201408.pdf?sequence=1)

Related works:
Journal Article: The water footprint of the Spanish agricultural sector: 1860–2010 (2014)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:seh:wpaper:1408

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Documentos de Trabajo de la Sociedad de Estudios de Historia Agraria from Sociedad de Estudios de Historia Agraria Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Antonio Linares ().