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BARCELONA — In the region of Osona, to the north of Barcelona, there are seven times as many pigs as people.
Hectares of pig farms — long, barrack-like brick buildings with half-closed windows — stretch from the roadside into the distance. Metal cylinders containing tons of feed jut out from their sides. Huge pools store decomposing animal waste.
As you get closer, the stench of ammonia and squeals of thousands of pigs overwhelm your senses.
Osona is renowned for its fuet, a traditional Catalan pork sausage, and for its stunning mountains and nature reserves. But water in half of its fountains has stopped flowing, according to a citizens’ platform created to defend the River Ter that cuts through the region. And that’s not just because there is no rain.
“The pig sector’s consumption of water already exceeds that of people,” said the head of the platform, Ginesta Mary. They estimated that the 1 million pigs in the region consume as much water as almost 200,000 people. The census counts a population of just over 150,000.
But water consumption isn’t the only issue angering the pigs’ human neighbors.
Of the fountains where the water still runs, over 40 percent are polluted by nitrates — the result of excessive dumping of animal feces. Concentrations are as high as 10 times the limit set by the World Health Organization (WHO), the River Ter platform found.
“Feces aren’t fertilizer, but a polluting agent,” Mary told POLITICO, calling for the number of pigs to be slashed by half to comply with the nitrate requirements.
Catalonia is at the forefront of the country’s and the EU’s pork production and exports, and the business is highly profitable.
But the worst drought in recent history — which has coincided with a proliferation of dry spells and devastating floods elsewhere in Europe — is exposing how Catalonia’s ambition to satisfy the world’s growing hunger for pork is pushing the region beyond the limits of what its environment can support.
Water is gold
With no significant rainfall in recent years, water reservoirs fell to 16 percent of capacity at the beginning of the year. Rains in early April brought some relief, but reservoir levels remain four points below the worst previous drought on record in 2008. As a result, the Catalan landscape is turning brown and dry — and competition for scarce water is heating up.
In February, the Catalan government activated an emergency plan across over half of its territory that affected 6 million people — four-fifths of the population. Restrictions include limiting daily water use to 200 liters per person. That could be cut to 160 liters if the situation worsens.
“The best solution is for it to rain. But we don’t have that, so we must be prepared for the future,” Meritxell Serret, the Catalan minister for foreign and EU affairs, told POLITICO in an interview.
The plan also includes restrictions on economic activities, including the agriculture and livestock sectors — some of the biggest consumers of water. Livestock farms will have to use 50 percent less water — meaning those in the affected municipalities will have to slash the number of animals by half.
Industrial uses — which include the killing and processing of meat — also face reductions of 25 percent.
The government has also reduced water flow along the River Ter — which rises in the Pyrenees. With these steps, the government is trying “to be more efficient with water and at the same time maintain the level of income in this local economy,” according to Serret, a former agriculture minister.
Local environmentalists say, however, that reducing the river flows will end up harming biodiversity.
For Annelies Broekman, agronomist and researcher at the Center for Ecological Research and Forestry Applications (CREAF) at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, climate is too often blamed for what’s actually an unsustainable approach to water use.
Water must first serve a social role, prioritizing “all life that depends on it, in which we are included,” she said, and then be distributed throughout “the whole chain of functions and values for society,” including economic activities.
“Some say we have to allocate water to the uses that generate the most profitability, and once again, the pigs would win,” she said, warning against “falling into the logic of whoever can pay does whatever they want.”
Pigs and Coca-Cola
Spain’s pork production has doubled in the past decade, and it already competes with countries like China and Brazil in the global market. Unsurprisingly, the country ranks first in the number of pigs in the EU with close to 35 million.
However, more than half of Spain’s exported pork comes from a single region — Catalonia, which exports over 70 percent of production. The biggest customer is China, while the main European destinations are France, Italy, Romania, Czech Republic and Poland.
“The Catalan livestock sector is a leading sector at European level and a mainstay of the economy of our regions,” explained Serret. “It’s a whole economic model with an entirely associated meat industry, retail, tourism and gastronomic sectors.”
But among those, the pig sector is “the goose that laid the golden eggs,” Broekman said. A pig farm’s net income is 10 times higher than the average olive farm and five times higher than that recorded by a cereal farm.
According to the researcher, the pig industry is profitable because it’s part of an integrated, industrialized model that “has nothing to do with rurality.”
“It’s an industry: Just like you would make Coca-Cola, you make pigs,” she said. Thousands of pigs are slaughtered every day in Catalonia, over 23 million a year. The average age of a pig at the time of killing is 6 months old.
To compete in this environment, many farmers have opted to “integrate” — or rent — their farms to a handful of companies that, between them, dominate the market.
Such multinationals require farmers to meet certain productivity targets — amount of feed; animal mortality; or the number of piglets per sow — in exchange for a stable income at the end of the month. They also supply their own pigs, feed and technologies to these farms, integrating them into their overall production chain. The companies usually control all stages of production — farrowing, weaning, fattening, slaughter and processing.
For farmers, it’s a pretty good deal. For environmentalists, it’s a recipe for industrial concentration and abuse of natural resources.
Marti Costal, from the Catalan organization of young farmers (JARC) owns apple trees, cereal crops and runs a farm with 1,100 pigs. His land spreads across the outskirts of Jafre, a village with no more than 400 residents in the coastal region of Girona.
Years ago, he switched to an integrated farming system. He says it’s the only part of his business that allows him to make a living.
“If you are small you have little purchasing power […] it’s a question of big fish eating small fish,” he said.
Costal explained that, when he operated as an independent farmer, he had to buy and sell at prices set by suppliers and distributors. He often ended up making a loss. “Instead, I saw that by only fattening [in an integrated system] I had more profit than by doing it all on my own,” he said.
However, for Mary, the head of the citizens’ platform to protect the River Ter, this model has transformed the pig sector into a “cheap meat factory.” Moreover, she stressed, such big and influential meat groups “can pollute with impunity.”
Environmental regulations — such as those to prevent nitrate pollution — must be complied with by the farmers, who are subrogated or integrated with the corporations.
“The excess of manure becomes the responsibility of the farmer, but these big companies are the ones to blame,“ she added.
Eloi Boada owns three integrated farms with 5,000 pigs in Girona and works for another one. He sits in the main square of Verges, a neighboring village, as he sips his café solo.
“They [the corporations] will dump you if you have 50 percent animal losses. But as long as the farm is working, they don’t care,” he said, describing the companies’ attitude towards environmental regulations.
Batallé, one of the largest companies in the sector, referred a request for comment to Miguel Àngel Higuera, director of the Spanish Association of Pig Producers (Anprogapor).
“Integration is the most sustainable model that allows production costs to be passed on, unify the product and guarantee traceability as well as compliance with all regulatory requirements since an integrating company, due to its visibility, cannot allow any failure,” he said comments emailed to POLITICO.
Underground issues
Manure from pig farms ends up being used as fertilizer in the same or nearby farms. But there is disagreement on whether this is a circular solution to get rid of it or whether it poses a risk to water and biodiversity.
“Environmentalists are very fussy,” said Boada, denying that farms contribute to water pollution.
However, he also added that “there are too many farms [and] many should close because they don’t give a damn [about the rules].” Inspectors, he added, “won’t go to some farms because they know they would have to close them.”
Costal, on the other hand, said that he uses all the manure that his farm produces in his fields, and he still lacks a little. “I requested the capacity of my pig farm based on the capacity of my land,” he added.
For Broekman it’s quite the opposite. “There’s an abundance of manure that the ground can’t absorb,” she said, adding that “it’s often applied incorrectly or in excess, therefore the consequences it has.”
Catalonia generates nearly 90,000 metric tons of organic nitrogen from livestock per year, according to a 2022 report by the Catalan Water Agency (ACA) — three times the nitrogen generated by the human population itself.
The agency concluded that nitrate excess was linked to livestock farming, as the maps of nitrogen production of agricultural origin are very similar to the maps of water bodies affected by excess nitrates and areas declared vulnerable.
In 2022, Greenpeace found that all measured Catalan groundwaters presented high levels of nitrate pollution, as well as 42 percent of surface waters — topping the list of the most polluted regions in Spain.
Climate-related shocks are becoming the norm and small-scale farming is being swallowed up by corporations that dominate the market. In this landscape, it’s hard to picture a viable alternative for many local farmers, while for local activists it’s even harder to believe that this trend won’t lead to irreversible environmental collapse.
“The few family businesses that have their own local market will survive, but the rest will go to the hands of big corporations — or will come from elsewhere,” said Costal, who was approaching retirement age despite being a member of the young farmers’ association.
Standing before his fields, he said that his daughter would probably find another profession. “You feel so suffocated from all sides that you don’t have strength to fight anymore.”
This story has been updated.
