Back To The Future: The new agriculture

There's a lot of land in Capdepera. An awful lot of land that they don't quite know what to do with. The old municipal rubbish dump had been earmarked for the faintly batty Christian theme park idea. Alcúdia may now be its location.

There's more land in Capdepera. Agricultural land that currently isn't doing anything. They're looking at re-cultivating it with the aims of selling produce to tourists and of creating employment in what is all but a lost agrarian tradition in the town.

The revitalisation of agriculture has become something of a theme bubbling under a wider discussion of the need for economic diversification. A back-to-the-future new agrarianism was spoken about in May this year when a gathering in Alaró, organised by the Camper footwear company, addressed the issue of diversification. It is one that plays well with an insular-nationalist Luddite tendency that would happily turn the clock back on tourism industrialisation.

But the worthies who met in Alaró were far from being cranks. Among their number was Jerry Mander of the International Forum on Globalization who, following something of a farmyard line of thinking, asserted that Mallorca was living a fantasy in believing that tourism would return to being the "hen laying golden eggs". Hens laying real eggs is more like it.

The feasibility of the plan for the land in Capdepera will consider what might be grown there and what might be viable in terms of products for sale to tourists. It is a plan that makes sense. Mander is not the only one who recognises the pointlessness of much more development of a strictly tourist nature - hotels, for example. Alternative uses of land that might be contemplated are similarly either pointless, such as ever more unnecessary golf courses or industrial estates, or would be most unlikely to be sanctioned on environmental grounds - proper theme parks, for instance. So what do you do with it that might be productive, other than perhaps build houses, which would require endless arguments regarding land re-classification?

While the plan appears to make sense insofar as it would be an appropriate use of land, where it may founder is on economic grounds. The problem with the new agrarianism of Mallorca is finding markets for what, in all likelihood, would not be much greater than cottage industries. The wine industry in Mallorca is something of an indicator of this. While there is reasonable volume created by the bigger and older bodegas, the newer ones are much smaller; they are of a boutique nature. Volume is low, prices are high, export possibilities are limited.

The cautiousness which seems to surround the Capdepera scheme is correct. It is correct because the demand for what might be grown - among tourists - is most unlikely to be huge. Herbs, olives (for oil), vines (for wine), dried fruits. None of it sounds like it will amount to anything substantial. Tourists might buy the odd bottle of wine or oil, but they do so already. The focus on tourists may be strategically flawed.

I have to thank the excellent skybluemallorca.com for the following information regarding Mallorcan olive oil. It says that a mere 2.7% of total sales of oil is local. The rest goes abroad, with Germany being a key market. It is export, not through a tourist's bottle or two, but through bulk that is far more important. And not just to mature European markets.

I know of a move to export wine and olive oil to Hong Kong. This involves at least one of the main bodegas on the island. Supplying to the Chinese market could only ever be limited because of the constraints on volume in Mallorca, but this bigger thinking in terms of market should surely be more of a model for what might be envisaged in Capdepera and indeed elsewhere in Mallorca. High-quality product, not necessarily cheap but more exclusive, and marketed as such, for newly aspirational consumer markets, such as the Chinese.

There is though a further issue and it is one related to productivity and the use of technology. Advances there most certainly have been, but one of Mallorca's more important crops, almonds, has suffered because the local industry has lost competitiveness. In the same way as the wine producers of the Napa Valley in California took on the French wine industry by adopting more advanced technology, so California's almond growers have attacked the indigenous almond industry.

What all this suggests is that, just as there should be a more coherent tourism strategy so there also should be one for agriculture. Back to the future it might be, but there is still much to be said in its favour. With investments in technology and marketing, there might even be a bright future. The fear is that Capdepera would fall into the black hole of simply being too local and too narrow in its focus. It is a lot of a land, but only relatively speaking. But it can be used to good purpose as there is an awful lot of market that can be served - and not just that of Mallorca and its tourists.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.