El pasado cuenta. El boom de los sectores aviar y porcino en España, 1955-2020

This work analyses the boom in the chicken and pork businesses in Spain from the mid-20th century until 2020. Its aim is to highlight the similarities and differences in the courses taken in the long term, verifying the strengths and weaknesses of both models and drawing conclusions in relation to the agribusiness system. The influence of chicken and pork in the booming Spanish meat sector is first analysed from the three perspectives of livestock farming, industry, and business. This is followed by a brief observation on the impact of both forms of intensive livestock farming on Spain’s domestic consumption and foreign trade. The following section analyses the strengths shared by the two livestock businesses, with a special focus on their competitiveness for both the domestic and international markets. Finally, the differences in the evolution of both sectors are identified from the perspective of food supply models in which the expansion of intensive livestock farming took place: until the 1980s a predominance of economies of scale based on homogeneous products at low cost, and in the last four decades the so-called economies of scope, based on differentiated products with high value-added and high quality.