Rural and agricultural sociology: new advances in social research in the fields of agri-food globalization

This book is situated within the tradition of agrarian and rural social studies that has been developing in Spain for decades from a critical perspective. Agriculture remains the economic sector with the greatest implications for land management, and therefore agrosocial sciences have also simultaneously portrayed the society that sustains this economy. While in the 1970s a number of classic publications reported on the decline of peasant agriculture and the rural-urban exodus, Spain's entry into the European Economic Community and the subsequent development of the Single European Market marked milestones in addressing the new modernizing changes in Spanish agriculture. It was the first wave of globalization in Spanish agriculture. With the turn of the century, the agriculture-society relationship has undergone new transformations, such as: the influence of large global distribution chains on the organization of agriculture, the emergence of a vigorous productive hub along the Mediterranean-Atlantic coast geared towards exports – especially in the fresh fruit and vegetable subsector –, new ownership structures with a full consolidation of the intensive agriculture business model, the recent entry of investment funds into agricultural capital, new regulations of the Common Agricultural Policy, the development of public-private governance through quality standards and certifications, the environmental debate and alternative food production systems, etc. In this book, more than twenty researchers from different Spanish, Latin American and European universities trace, from different theoretical and thematic perspectives, the implications of the process of de-agrarianization and de-peasantization, underway for decades in rural societies, as an effect of the globalization of agriculture and the food system. The critical approach presented analytically accounts for these simultaneous processes of de-agrarianization and agri-food globalization, while also presenting the possibilities of political alternatives to the global food regime.

How to cite this collective work: Pedreño, Andrés and Castro, Carlos de (eds.) (2025). Rural and agricultural sociology: new advances in social research in the fields of agri-food globalization . Madrid: Center for Sociological Research.

How to cite a specific chapter of the collective work:

Díaz Geada, Alba (2025). "The Agrarian Question" and Contemporary Agrarian History: Some Questions for Reflection. In: Pedreño, Andrés and Castro, Carlos de (eds.) (2025). Rural and Agricultural Sociology: New Advances in Social Research in the Fields of Agri-Food Globalization . Madrid: Center for Sociological Research.

Index of the Work

Access to the first pages

Information about the authors of the collective work