The industrial sovereignty. Feed-livestock complex industries and the implantation of the Fordist consumer model in Spain: 1960-1975

Abstract

The generalization of the mass consumer society in Spain after 1960 brought significant nutritional changes, specially a strong increase in the number of animal proteins. The change in Spanish nourishing consumption followed, more or less, the pattern of other developed countries, but some consumptions carried out a particulary intense growth. This work studies the existing relationship between the most successful food in Spain between 1960 and 1975, chicken, pig, milk and sunflower oil, and the implantation of the feed-livestock industrial complex, heavily dependent on foreign capital and technology, while on the other hand analyses its capacity to impose its preferences to the Spanish consumer. In the end, the absence of competitive industries in the food sector, next to an agriculture and husbandry still quite traditional, allowed those industries from the complex to monopolize the Spanish market with its products, a process in which the institucional permissiveness had much to do with.