Miquel Ortega

Fundació ENT

The SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus pandemic starting at the end of 2019 impacted many human activities. We analysed the abrupt reduction in fishing pressure of the mixed small-scale and industrial fisheries in the Catalan Sea, Spanish Mediterranean, and resulting ecological and economic impacts during the first half of 2020. We used detailed fisheries data...

Aquaculture is one of the fastest growing food‐producing sectors, and its share in global seafood production is rising significantly compared with capture fisheries. This transforms seafood production practices while allowing capital to expand to new marine commodity frontiers. Building on the conceptualization of aquaculture as a new frontier for...

Alzheimer's disease (AD) has a high worldwide prevalence but little is known about its aetiology and risk factors. Recent research suggests environmental factors might increase AD risk. We aim to describe the association between AD mortality and the presence of highly polluting industry in small areas in Spain between 1999 and 2010. We calculated A...

Increasing demand for seafood and the lack of growth of capture fisheries have boosted aquaculture growth worldwide. However, European aquaculture has been stagnating over the past decade, and European public authorities have been developing policies and strategies in efforts to reverse this. Aquaculture discourses in the European Union, based on 3...

Autarkic ideology and economic policies were central features of the interwar period in Europe. Despite autarky's connection to geographical concepts such as space, resources and population, its historical impact has been relatively little explored in the literature. In this article, we first present how the concept of ‘autarky’ conflates two etymo...

The increasing demand for fish products and the stagnation of capture fisheries has promoted the growth of aquaculture globally, leading to a significant increase in socio-environmental conflicts mainly in relation with finfish aquaculture. Despite this significant global growth, the European aquaculture sector has instead experienced stagnation in...

The recent context of global food emergency and ecological crisis has increased the relevance of people's struggle for food sovereignty (FSv), which promotes the transformation of the dominant food system and claims ‘the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and thei...

There is a concern that agriculture will no longer be able to meet, on a global scale, the growing demand for food. Facing such a challenge requires new patterns of thinking in the context of complexity and sustainability sciences. This paper, focused on the social dimension of the study and management of agricultural systems, suggests that rethink...

Vivimos en tiempos de crisis... así empieza este libro que no pretende analizar lo desastrosamente mal que están las cosas. Todo lo contrario, es un libro de utopías en construcción, de procesos emancipatorios, de cómo reconstruir todo aquello que se relaciona con nuestros campos y nuestros alimentos, más allá de lo que se nos ha impuesto como rent...

Agricultural international policies still base their decision-making process on tools that consider the agri-food system rather stable or, at most, as facing uncertainty conditions. Used tools to support international agricultural policies include future projections of agricultural prices and production– e.g. Agricultural Outlook projections-, whic...

La crisis alimentaria del año 2008 situó en la agenda política, una vez más, uno de los retos globales más importantes que la humanidad debe afrontar: satisfacer el derecho a la alimentación de una manera sostenible. La Soberanía Alimentaria es un concepto, propuesto y desarrollado por numerosas organizaciones campesinas, que puede contribuir al ob...

From a thermodynamic point of view economies are open systems far from equilibrium, and neo-classical environmental economics is not the best way to describe the behaviour of such systems. Standard economic analysis takes a continuous, deterministic and predictive approach, which encourages the search for predictive policy to 'correct' environmenta...

0. Abstract The objective of this paper is to analyse the role of sustainability indicators when considered as discursive elements of the sustainability discourse. Sustainability indicators have the particularity of having a scientific-objective appearance, and we argue that this allows their users to link sustainability utterances with the scienti...

This paper analyses the writing up and approval process of the European Union Directive on waste from electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE). This analysis shows that European Union faces many challenges in its policy-making processes. Not all stakeholders affected by the European directive have the same chances to introduce their points of vie...

International agricultural policy usually considers "ignorance" as a situation that represents a failure of knowledge and policies, and not as a characterization of an specific state that better describes our knowledge relation with the international agri-food system. As a consequence, tools such as future projection of agricultural prices – e.g. A...

Este trabajo de investigación analiza la estructura de los mecanismos de financiación pública para fomentar las exportaciones e inversiones españolas en el extranjero (particularmente en los países en desarrollo), estudia sus principales limitaciones desde la perspectiva de justicia ambiental y propone actuaciones para la mejora de su gestión ambie...