Juan Infante-Amate

Juan Infante-Amate
University of Granada | UGR · Departamento de Teoría e Historia Económica

BSc Economics, MS Agroecology, PhD History

About

134
Publications
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2,802
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Additional affiliations
July 2015 - April 2017
Universidad Pablo de Olavide
Position
  • Professor
September 2011 - present
Universidad Pablo de Olavide
Position
  • Professor (Associate)

Publications

Publications (134)
Article
Full-text available
Resumen El concepto del metabolismo social ha cobrado una gran importancia dentro de los estudios que tratan de comprender las interacciones entre la sociedad y la naturaleza. Desde la década de 1990 su impacto ha crecido exponencialmente siendo utilizado por numerosos autores provenientes de diferentes disciplinas científicas. El objetivo de este...
Article
The role of trade in global environmental change is receiving increasing attention and there is a lively debate about Ecologically Unequal Exchange (EUE). Little is known, however, about the role of colonial legacy for the evolution of physical trade patterns. This study provides empirical evidence on the basis of a systematic evaluation of global...
Article
After centuries of deforestation, many, mostly industrialized countries have recently been experiencing net increases in forest area and biomass stocks, a phenomenon described as ‘Forest Transition’. In this article, we analyse the Spanish forest transition over the last 150 years from a socio-metabolic perspective. We provide the first estimation...
Article
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Latin America has long played a key role in the global provision of natural resources. Most of the continent's economies are net exporters of low-value, primary products and importers of manufactured goods at a high price. This pattern of specialised trade has highly negative consequences for economic development, the environment, and the local pop...
Article
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Since the Industrial Revolution, modern economic growth has made the world increasingly (if unevenly) rich. This trajectory led to unprecedented improvements in human wellbeing but, at the same time, produced environmental impacts which threaten material prosperity itself. Against this background, the great challenge of the 21st century is to conti...
Technical Report
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El impacto en el empleo de la transición agroecológica en España Informe
Article
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Early energy analyses of agriculture revealed that behind higher labor and land productivity of industrial farming, there was a decrease in energy returns on energy (EROI) invested, in comparison to more traditional organic agricultural systems. Studies on recent trends show that efficiency gains in production and use of inputs have again somewhat...
Article
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Overuse of N fertilizers in crops has induced the disruption of the N cycle, triggering the release of reactive N (Nr) to the environment. Several EU policies have been developed to address this challenge, establishing targets to reduce agricultural Nr losses. Their achievement could be materialized through the introduction of fertilizing innovatio...
Article
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El artículo pretende contribuir al debate sobre la transición agroalimentaria con el análisis de una serie de escenarios de transición que combinan medidas a nivel de producción con otras de consumo, analizando los impactos en las dietas y en 6 indicadores biofísicos relacionados con los sistemas planetarios.
Preprint
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Greenhouse gas emissions embodied in international trade have risen sharply over the last few decades because of the globalization of economies and countries’ productive specialization. We have built a model able to trace all agro-food emissions along global value chains for 1986–2013. The results show that while the domestic fraction of food emiss...
Article
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In this paper, we examine the evolution of Spanish agriculture from 1992 to 2017, exploring the specific relationship between the agricultural population and the provision of agroecosystem services (AE-S). Traditionally, family farming has sustained the quality of the biophysical fund elements of agroecosystems through the work that family members...
Chapter
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La sostenibilidad de la producción agrícola requiere de enfoques holísticos que consideren todas sus dimensiones. La agroecología proporciona un buen marco para elaborar estrategias de sostenibilidad desde esta perspectiva holística. La reconexión de la producción y consumo de biomasa, la diversificación de los agroecosistemas, la conservación del...
Book
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El Libro Blanco de la Alimentación Sostenible en España, realizado por la Fundación Alternativas y la Fundación Carasso, identifica y propone las principales claves para lograr una transición hacia sistemas alimentarios sostenibles y resilientes. Este objetivo se plasma en cada uno de los 13 capítulos temáticos que componen el volumen, a través de...
Article
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The main type of consumptive water use is crop evapotranspiration. The historical evolution of crop evapotranspiration depends on climate and cropland changes. These two latter variables present complex interactions and are expected to continue changing in the future, but the coupling between these two processes is insufficiently addressed in the l...
Article
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Este artículo da a conocer los resultados de dos investigaciones realizadas durante varios años sobre la evolución de la agricultura española y el cambio experimentado hacia un modelo de agricultura industrializada. La primera investigación trató de analizar los cambios habidos desde inicios del siglo XX desde un punto de vista biofísico, empleando...
Article
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Synthetic nitrogen (N) fertilization has helped boost agricultural yields, but it is also responsible for direct and indirect greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Fertilizer-related emissions are also promoted by irrigation and manure application, which has increased with livestock industrialization. Spanish agriculture provides a paradigmatic example o...
Article
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Costa Rica is recognized worldwide for its nature conservation policy following the traditional land-sparing approach. However, concerns have been raised about the opposite trends of the agricultural land cover changes driven by the option to expand old and new export crops after the country’s external debt crisis of the 1980s. We study what happen...
Article
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En este trabajo presentamos una serie histórica de los indicadores de extracción, comercio y uso de materiales recogidos en la metodología de la Contabilidad del Flujo de Materiales, un sistema armonizado internacionalmente para cuantificar el uso de recursos a nivel regional. Con los resultados obtenidos analizamos la transición al metabolismo ind...
Chapter
At least 200,000 people died from hunger or malnutrition-related diseases in Spain during the 1940s. This book provides a political explanation for the famine and brings together a broad range of academics based in Spain, the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia to achieve this. Topics include the political causes of the famine, the phys...
Chapter
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Este artículo analiza los flujos de energía en los agroecosistemas de café de Costa Rica entre 1935 y 2010, en el contexto de la Transición Socio-Ecológica (TSE). Se busca estimar indicadores que evidencien la transición energética en este cultivo, con el objetivo de conocer la evolución de su eficiencia, como indicador de sostenibilidad. Aunque ex...
Article
In recent decades, there has been growing concern regarding worsening global climate conditions for agricultural production, especially in Mediterranean climate and other semi-arid areas where the scarcity of water is a major problem. The objective of the study was to estimate the long-term evolution (in Spain, over 1922–2016) of the decoupling bet...
Technical Report
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La “huella de carbono” expresa, en términos de CO2 equivalentes (CO2e), la cantidad de GEI emitida y carbono capturado en la elaboración de un producto o servicio. En este trabajo se ha estimado la huella de carbono del sistema agroalimentario y de la alimentación de la población residente en España, contabilizando de manera pormenorizada las emisi...
Article
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América Latina ha desempeñado, y sigue desempeñando, un papel clave en el suministro global de recursos naturales. La mayoría de sus economías son exportadoras netas de productos primarios con poco valor añadido mientras que importan bienes manufacturados a precios más elevados. Existe un consenso generalizado entre investigadores de diferentes dis...
Article
A global multi-regional input-output model with sub-national resolution for Galicia, north-west Spain, was used to study physical and value added trade balances between Galicia, the rest of Spain and the world. Within the framework of Ecologically Unequal Exchange theory, we argue that a region, such as Galicia, can play a twofold role as core and...
Chapter
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The main social fund element (agricultural population) emits a work flow that is measurable in terms of energy. It also originates an integrated information flow that supports the structure and functioning of the agroecosystem. This flow is generated by households, whose “reproduction” is not only of a biological nature: it also relies on economic...
Chapter
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This chapter is focused in the environmental consequences of the industrialization of the Spain’s agriculture. The changes in the quantity and quality of energy and material flows described in the previous chapters have contributed to the deterioration of the quality of the land fund element, which supports the provision of ecosystems services, inc...
Chapter
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During the socio-metabolic transition to the current industrial society, agriculture has been relegated, in favor of fossil fuels and minerals, as main source of energy and material, and this has provoked a big quantitative and qualitative changes in its technical means of agricultural and livestock productions. In this chapter, the changes of the...
Chapter
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This chapter is focused in the assessment of the changes and performance of biophysical, land and livestock fund elements throughout the twentieth century to meet society’s biomass requirements. First section of the chapter provides a historiographic review of the main transformations in Spanish agriculture since 1900s. In the second section, we re...
Chapter
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The main aim of this chapter is to describe the theoretical and methodological bases that support the research contained in this book and developed through the following chapters. The rationale of the need for a new perspective on the evolution of Spain’s agricultural sector over the last century, focused on sustainability, from a social and ecolog...
Chapter
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In this chapter, the structure, functioning, and dynamics of the Spanish Agrarian Metabolism within the broader context of the whole Spanish economy are characterized. Biomass demand and domestic consumption, and the extent of which the agrarian sector and foreign trade fulfilled that demand are the cores of this chapter, as there are the main driv...
Book
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This open access book provides a panoramic view of the evolution of Spanish agriculture from 1900 to the present, offering a more diverse picture to the complex and multidimensional reality of agrarian production. With a clear transdisciplinary ambition, the book applies an original and innovative theoretical and methodological tool, termed Agraria...
Chapter
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(...) Los rendimientos de cultivo se han triplicado entre 1950 y 2008. Este incremento en la producción ha estado acompañado, no obstante, de profundos desequilibrios. En el caso de la producción ganadera, si bien sectores como el porcino y el avícola (especialmente de carne de pollo) han experimentado una creciente expansión, ésta se ha debido en...
Article
Interest in agricultural oils has grown dramatically in recent years for a variety of reasons, as the participants detail below: popular attention to the health benefits or perils of food oils, concerns about the environmental and social disruptions associated with various kinds of oil production, and the ways oil histories expose tensions between...
Article
Irrigation in the Mediterranean region has been used for millennia and has greatly expanded with industrialization. Irrigation is critical for climate change adaptation, but it is also an important source of greenhouse gas emissions. This study analyzes the carbon (C) footprint of irrigation in Spain, covering the complete historical process of mec...
Article
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Although firewood was the main energy source until recently in most parts of the world, our understanding of its consumption levels is still quite limited, even in regard to recent periods. The powerful impact of fossil energy carriers and their major effects on global ecology, economy and society have led us to underestimate the role firewood has...
Article
Mechanization of agriculture drastically increases labour productivity in crop production, playing a major role in industrialization by freeing up workforce for industry and services. These historical processes are well studied, but there is much less knowledge on their environmental implications, particularly the carbon footprint. In this work, we...
Article
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This article aims to situate a national case study of the global periphery at the core of the debate on the socio-ecological transition by drawing on new data of biomass flows in twentieth-century Colombia. We draw up a century-long annual series converting a wide set of indicators from Net Primary Production (NPP) into the final socioeconomic uses...
Article
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p>El 27 de enero de 2017, la UNESCO ha incluido al paisaje del olivar andaluz en una lista tentativa de futuros patrimonios mundiales, lo que presenta oficialmente en el mundo estos paisajes y exige mantener sus valores patrimoniales. Aquí se ofrece una lectura científica e interdisciplinar de las claves geográficas, históricas y estéticas que just...
Article
This paper analyses the use of energy in the Spanish Agri-Food System (ASF) between 1960 and 2010. It distinguishes between several different forms of energy (renewable, non-renewable, final and primary), six sectors and up to a hundred activities. The use of energy in the AFS increased 10.2 fold during the period analysed, from 181 TJ to 1855 TJ,...
Article
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The high grain yield of modern varieties (MV) respond to the increase in fossil-based inputs, and the widespread belief that they are more productive than old varieties (OV) is biased. This belief focuses only on marketable biomass, without considering the consequences on agroecosystem sustainability of the reductions in other portions of NPP. Addi...
Article
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El presente artículo presenta una investigación comparada en cuatro comarcas andaluzas, de cara a identificar estrategias de supervivencia de pequeños operadores alimentarios en el contexto local. Para ello cruza distintas características territoriales y diferentes cadenas de distribución, en relación con tres alimentos distintos (hortaliza, vino y...
Article
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Peripheral stakeholders, such as small food retailers that are not completely integrated in alternative food networks, show high potential for upscaling local food systems. We have been done fieldwork-based research in four different counties in Andalusia (Spain), using a mixed, qualitative/quantitative analysis. We have produced a typology of loca...
Article
Population increase, the change in consumption patterns and a greater demand for biomaterials will continue to put pressure on the use of land over the coming decades, an increasingly scarce and degraded resource. Trade allows the environmental impact of consumption to be outsourced to third countries, although it also allows production to be locat...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
La transición energética se suele caracterizar como la sustitución de energías tradicionales por energías fósiles. En este trabajo queremos demostrar que más que un proceso de sustitución lo que tuvo lugar fue un proceso de adición: el consumo de bioenergías se mantuvo relativamente estable mientras que el de combustible fósiles creció aceleradamen...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
El manejo de la fertilidad de la tierra es hoy señalado como principal variable explicativa de las revoluciones agrícolas que han tenido lugar desde el siglo XVIII. Sin embargo, apenas contamos con trabajos que profundicen en los procesos de cambio agrario en agriculturas tropicales y, menos aún, en sistemas agroforestales, en los que el reciclaje...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Cuando se analizan los patrones de poblamiento en perspectiva histórica la distinción entre población rural y urbana suele ser la taxonomía más recurrente, habiendo sido señalada como proxy del nivel de industrialización y de desarrollo económico. Las estimaciones históricas suelen basarse en censos de población que aportan datos para el conjunto d...
Article
Full-text available
According to the agroecological approach, energy analyses applied to agriculture should provide information about the structure and functions of the agroecosystem; in other words, about the maintenance of its fund elements, which sustain the flow of ecosystem services. To this end, we have employed a methodological proposal that adds agroecological...
Article
Full-text available
This article addresses energy flows in the coffee agro-ecosystems of Costa Rica within the context of the socio-ecological transition, between 1935 and 2010, accounting for the shift from traditional to modern tropical agriculture. Estimating indicators of energy efficiency in crop management makes it possible to analyze the changing productive rat...
Article
Full-text available
Agrarian metabolism applies the social metabolism framework to agriculture. It focuses on the study of the exchange of material and energy flows between a society and its environment for producing useful biomass. These flows must maintain the fund elements of the agroecosystem in sufficient quantity and of sufficient quality for them to continue pr...
Article
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For a large extent of historiography, the history of Spanish agriculture during the twentieth century is a story of success. However, this narrative has been built on monetary analysis, and it does not usually take into account the effects on rural society and agroecosystems. The aim of this paper is to analyze what has happened from a biophysical...
Article
Soil organic carbon (SOC) management is key for soil fertility and for mitigation and adaptation to climate change, particularly in desertification-prone areas such as Mediterranean croplands. Industrialization and global change processes affect SOC dynamics in multiple, often opposing, ways. Here we present a detailed SOC balance in Spanish cropla...
Poster
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Entradas de carbono en la agricultura española en el largo plazo, 1900-2008
Poster
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Revisión de las principales estrategias de reducción de GEI en sistemas agrícolas mediterráneos, tanto agronómicas como estructurales. Evaluación de barreras y oportunidades de implementación.
Article
Since prehistoric times, farmers have faced the challenge of balancing the demand for increasing food production from existing soil resources with conservation of these resources. Land use change from natural vegetation to agricultural land and intensification of agricultural soil management are closely linked to increased rates of soil erosion. Th...
Article
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An integrated assessment of the potential of different management practices for mitigating specific components of the total GHG budget (N2O and CH4 emissions and C sequestration) of Mediterranean agrosystems was performed in this study. Their suitability regarding both yield and environmental (e.g. nitrate leaching and ammonia volatilization) susta...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Un conocimiento detallado de la evolución de la ganadería española es imprescindible para una correcta evolución de la agricultura. La ganadería constituyó un elemento central para la reproducción de la agricultura orgánica tradicional, proveyendo servicios tan esenciales como el estiércol, trabajo, el transporte o la provisión de alimentos y mater...