The Cultural Basis of a Regional Economy: The Vega Baja del Segura in Spain

Abstract

The Vega Baja del Segura is a region in southeastern Spain with a long history of combining commercial agriculture and labor-intensive manufacturing (producing footwear, wooden boxes, fishing nets, carpets, and other items). At present, manufacturing firms competing in a global market put pressure on the local subcontractors for lower costs. Creating wealth here depends on producing cultural and social differences among people who otherwise share feelings of belonging to the same family, village, region, or class. Further, history is an active force in the construction of present-day social relations and of the practical consciousness called culture. (Spain, regional culture, informal economy, work, global economy) The Vega Baja del Segura is a district located in southeastern Spain, in the Autonomous Community of Valencia (Comunidad Autonoma Valenciana). It is in the southernmost part of this Autonomous Community (A.C.) and is located in the province of Alicante, bordering the Region of Murcia (Region Murciana). The nearest large city is the port of Alicante (272,432 inhabitants in the 1998 census) to the northeast of the Vega Baja. The Vega Baja del Segura is the irrigated plain in the basin of the Segura River, near its mouth. This area comprises the region between the towns of Elche (191,713 inhabitants) to the north, Crevillente (23,945 inhabitants) to the northwest, and Orihuela (50,581 inhabitants) to the west. Vega Baja, Vega Media, and Vega Alta are geographical areas of the Segura fluvial basin. In the Region of Murcia, Vega Alta and Vega Media are also territorial districts (comarca) that include a few municipalities. The Vega Baja is the territorial district of the A.C. of Valencia, sometimes referred to as Bajo Segura. The area is irrigated through a system of canals that bring water from the Segura and Tajo Rivers. The present irrigation system was organized during the 1950s and 1960s, taking advantage of Francoist incentives for public waterworks that were supposed to extend irrigated areas in Spain, increase land productivity, and thereby end the recurrent scarcity attributed to the drought (la pertinaz sequia) (Ortega 1992; Bautista 1992).(2) One of these irrigation projects was a pipe and reservoir network connecting the Rivers Tajo and Segura that would regulate the flow of water of the Segura River and increase the yields of irrigated land in the Vega Alta, Vega Media, Vega Baja, and the Campo de Cartagena. The irrigation network was awaited with excitement by all, small and large landowners alike, and was operative by the beginning of the 1980s. The structure of land tenure was completely transformed during the 1970s, when many local day laborers, small renters, industrial workers, and migrants bought small plots of land and became landowners who either worked the land directly on a part-time basis, rented it, or had it worked by sharecroppers. Although the irrigation system seems to have achieved its objectives in most of the Vega Media, Vega Alta, and Campo de Cartagena, this was not so in the Vega Baja, where recurrent droughts and salinization have constrained agricultural productivity. In the 1990s, lemons, artichokes, melons, and other crops were cultivated in the area, particularly in places like the town of Cox (5,794 inhabitants). This small town now has large warehouses and has become a distribution center for the vegetable and fruit domestic and export markets. Local warehousers (almacenistas) in Cox service the larger southeastern area of irrigated planes in the Murcia Region such as the Huerta de Lorca (the orchard around the town of Lorca) and the Campo de Cartagena (the plain around the town of Cartagena), as well as the irrigated plains in the Vega Baja and the Campo de Elche, in the Valencia A.C. Large-scale agricultural production in the Vega Baja is directly managed and generally tied to warehouses: sometimes the local brokers or warehousers own or rent large pieces of land, so that production and marketing are vertically integrated. …