Abstract
Mallorca keeps an age-old biocultural heritage embodied in their appealing landscapes, largely exploited as an intangible tourist asset. Although hotel and real estate investors ignore or despise the peasant families who still persevere in farming amidst this worldwide-known tourist hotspot, the Balearic Autonomous Government has recently started a pay-for-ecosystem-services scheme based on the tourist eco-tax collection that offers grants to farmers that keep the Majorcan cultural landscapes alive, while a growing number of them have turned organic. How has this peasant heritage survived within such a global tourist capitalist economy? We answer this question by explaining the socio-ecological transition experienced from the failure of agrarian capitalism in the island, and the ensuing peasantization process during the first half of the 20th century through a local banking-driven and market-oriented land reform. Then, the early tourist specialization during the second half of the 20th century and the spatial concentration of the Green Revolution only in certain areas of the island meant a deep marginalization of peasant farming. Ironically, only a smallholder peasantry could keep cultivating these sustenance-oriented marginal areas where traditional farming was partially maintained and is currently being reinvigorated by turning organic. Now the preservation of these biocultural landscapes, and the keeping of the ecosystem services it provides to Majorcan society, requires keeping this peasantry alive.
Highlights
Peasant Landscapes as Biocultural HeritageThe island of Mallorca became a tourist destination for the European elites very early, during the Belle Époque (1870–1914)
Hotel and real estate investors ignore or despise the peasant families who still persevere in farming amidst this worldwide-known tourist hotspot, the Balearic Autonomous Government has recently started a pay-for-ecosystem-services scheme based on the tourist eco-tax collection that offers grants to farmers that keep the Majorcan cultural landscapes alive, while a growing number of them have turned organic
How has this peasant heritage survived within such a global tourist capitalist economy? We answer this question by explaining the socio-ecological transition experienced from the failure of agrarian capitalism in the island, and the ensuing peasantization process during the first half of the 20th century through a local banking-driven and market-oriented land reform
Summary
The island of Mallorca became a tourist destination for the European elites very early, during the Belle Époque (1870–1914). Two different agricultural economies competed for the land in early Mallorca: the poly-cultural, labor-intensive peasant farming and the land-extensive farming of large estates Their combination set a socio-agro-ecological limit to the expanded reproduction of that agrarian class structure that posed an inescapable dilemma to the Majorcan nobility: every time their land rents decreased, they could get fresh cash by offering small allotments to peasants who would pay a greater rent per unit of land by intensifying their farming. The industrialization of agriculture and the adoption of Green Revolution techniques took place in variegated forms in the island from the very beginning Their introduction was different according to institutional factors, such as the size of farm and ownership, and farming practices, such as intensive irrigated cropland or dry-land polyculture with mixed crop species.
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