New figures released in Spain show that the country has lost almost a quarter of its farms in the last ten years.

In ten years, Spain has lost 2.4 million hectares of agricultural land. Figures presented in Spain’s Congress of Deputies at the end of April show that the regions of Valencia and Andalusia in the south, and Galicia in the north, have suffered the highest rates of farm abandonment.

As with other European countries, Spain has seen a consolidation of land into bigger farms, with 0.44% of farms accounting for 17% of the farmed land. Farm union COAG said this shows the dominance of “Landlordism” in Spanish agriculture.

A number of farm organisations, working with the journal of Food Sovereignty, Biodiversity and Farming, made a presentation to lawmakers in the Congress on 28th April, pushing for the development of “a policy of fair and sustainable land use in Spain and Europe”, which the campaigners hope will ease pressures that are leading to farm abandonment in Spain, and compounding poverty in rural areas.

They warned that “The ownership of land in Europe has become so unequal that in some regions levels are nearing levels of consolidation seen in Brazil and Colombia,” two countries known for their unequal distribution of land. Campaigners said that, at the EU level, 3% of farms control 50% of the agricultural area.

The farmers and campaigners calling for a policy to govern land-use in Madrid also pointed to the inequalities in land ownership: Only 23% of landowners in Spain are women (although in some regions such as Galicia the percentage rises to 47%) and young people only own 6.6% of land.

The groups presenting in the Congress agreed that a sustainable land policy would focus on:

• Curbing speculation on agricultural land.
• Ensuring more egalitarian and democratic land use, which would benefit both society and the rural economy.
• Improving access to land for both women and young people.
• Avoiding concentration of land in the hands of certain economic sectors.
• Protecting biodiversity and maintaining the fertility of agricultural land.
• Improving community ownership of land.

The groups called for the creation of a ‘public agency for land management’ to deliver these aims.

Earlier in April, UK farm unions the Tenant Farmers Association and Landworkers Alliance dropped a banner over the entrance to the treasury building in protest against the government’s austerity programme, which has led to the sell-off of publicly owned farmland. The banner drop was intended to draw attention to the 219 publicly owned council farms that have been sold off since 2010, when the Coalition government came to power, and criticise the leadership that has allowed “Public food and farming assets [to be] regarded as any other commodity to be bought and sold,” when these are often a vital first step into farming for those who haven’t land to inherit.

Speaking at the demonstration, Humphrey Lloyd of the LWA said, “the loss of eight percent of the public farm estate over the past five years has had a massive impact on new entrants into farming and has turned public resources for the many into private wealth for the few.”