A World of Entrepreneurs: The Establishment of International Agribusiness During the Spanish Pork and Poultry Boom, 1950-2000

Abstract

The development of intensive livestock farming in Western Europe after 1950 has been somewhat overlooked by historians, except in a number of macroeconomic works. This process has generally been understood as the application of the American agribusiness model to the European livestock sector through the direct and vertical connection between large feed companies and local farmers. Spain is a good place to test this idea, given the phenomenal expansion experienced by its livestock sector in the second half of the twentieth century and the strong influence large multinational, particularly American, feed manufacturers had on this growth. Oral histories offer insight into the microeconomic forces at work in the recent development of Spanish livestock farming and highlight the role of local entrepreneurs in the establishment of livestock agribusiness.