The growth of macro-pig farming is today the main example in Spain of the concentration in a few hands of an entire agricultural sector. In Catalonia alone, eight large companies control 30% of all farms, or a total of more than 34.3 million head of pigs. But this process is not limited to agricultural operations alone. Also the slaughterhouses of the big ones assets of the meat industry are increasingly important.
Currently, only 2% of livestock slaughters are carried out in slaughterhouses considered local or nearby, the majority of which are public. Classified as low capacity slaughterhouses (EBC, according to its Catalan acronym), their role within the meat industry has disappeared over the years. From 1998 to 2022, around a hundred slaughterhouses belonging to municipalities have closed their doors.
This is confirmed by a study by the Barcelona Urban Research Institute (IDRA), Infrastructure for sustainable foodwho regrets that a community like Catalonia has gone in the past from practically one of these slaughterhouses in each municipality – decades ago, their existence was even obligatory – to only retaining 47.
Historically linked to municipalities – many of those that remain are still public – these local slaughterhouses are “fundamental” for the survival of small livestock and organic producers. “The vast majority of these slaughterhouses are not profitable in themselves due to their size, but at the same time they are decisive for their partners to be able to achieve a certain breeding model,” explains Mauro Castro, researcher and author of the study.
The more concentrated a sector is, the more the role of these slaughterhouses diminishes. In Catalonia, we see that their share in sheep slaughter is still significant, at 24% of the total, it is much lower in horses (3.6%), cattle (1.2%) and especially in pigs, where they represent only 0.21%.
However, notes the study, small slaughterhouses retain a “paradoxical vitality”. They still serve some 892 breeders, or 10% of the total, and 424 butchers. “This confirms its essential role in the local economic fabric and reveals latent potential, with ample room to integrate new users,” adds the report.
In the case of pigs, one of the reasons for the loss of importance is precisely the concentration of companies. Some 200 companies control 80% of pig farming in Catalonia, and most of them do so through the integration model. In other words, farmers manage the farms themselves, they are responsible for fattening the animals, but they are not the owners. They therefore do not decide which slaughterhouse they should be sent to once their cycle is completed.
In Catalonia there are slaughterhouses capable of slaughtering around 15,000 pigs per day. These include, for example, Olot Meats, in Olot (Girona), or Le Porc Gourmet, of the Jorge group, which temporarily suspended some 300 employees in Santa Eugènia de Berga due to African swine fever.
“The breeder is no longer the owner, he is only in 19% of farms,” confirms Castro. Which also underlines that it is a fish that bites its tail. The closure of local slaughterhouses also discourages organic farmers and local food circuits. “The typical sentence from farm to fork It’s a lie, because you lack infrastructure in the middle, there is part of the chain that you have lost,” warns this researcher.
Among other reasons for this decline, the IDRA highlights successive legislation which has gradually weakened the municipal obligation to have this equipment. The final touch, they point out, came in the last decade with the Montoro law on local government. “Without literally prohibiting municipal subsidies, it restricted the possibility of covering structural deficits” with municipal coffers, they point out.
Faced with this situation, IDRA defends the importance of banking on local slaughterhouses if we want to strengthen local and sustainable producers. They make it possible to develop direct sales channels, redistribute margins, increase animal welfare, avoid travel and emissions and improve traceability. “Everyone talks about small breeders, that we want there to be extensive breeding, to take care of the forests… It’s very romantic, but without an industry to support it, it’s impossible,” says Castro.
The IDRA gives as an example in its study the public-community slaughterhouse of Armentera, the only one in the Alt Empordà region (Girona), which is publicly owned and managed in a cooperative manner. This slaughterhouse, they emphasize, is the only one in the region and has become a reference that could be reproduced in other regions, with the participation of local breeders and butchers in its management.
“When producers can slaughter and process their livestock locally, they stop being simple suppliers of raw materials and become processors and traders capable of managing the entire process,” they conclude.
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