The Marchena City Council has joined the Municipal Cattle-Meat Network, a platform with which the interprofessional organizations of the meat chain (Asici, Avianza, Intercun, Interovic, Interporc and Provacuno) want to thank the vital role that municipalities play in facilitating the development of this activity in rural areas.
The municipal plenary session has approved in its session on Friday, July 30, an institutional declaration in which it highlights the importance that the chain has in the economy of the region. In turn, the Plenary as a whole has shown its intention to continue supporting the municipality’s livestock farmers, the meat industries that transform raw materials into processed products and the distributors and merchants who offer them to consumers.
The agricultural and livestock-meat activity has historically been of great relevance in the life and economy of the Sevillian town, which currently has a strong production and agri-food processing industry and livestock products implantation. In fact, these sectors currently employ many families from Marchene and neighboring towns in the municipality and generate a significant percentage of the region’s economic income and of employment and social development opportunities.
The Mayor of Marchena has remarked that this support is completed with the need for this sector to bet on a more sustainable development by developing the renovation and adaptation of its facilities and modes of production to the environmental requirements demanded by Europe and requesting aid policies for this to the EU aimed at the sector and R + D + I for the lower generation of Carbon.
The municipal livestock-meat network to which Marchena has just joined is an initiative that also aspires to become a platform for dialogue between the private and public sectors at the municipal level. The objective is to seek synergies to promote the conditions that have allowed the livestock-meat chain to become the main economic engine of many of the country’s municipalities and cities. The economic and social power of the chain has also allowed livestock and meat activity to become one of the main backbones of Rural Spain. The main reason is the ability of livestock and meat companies to create quality jobs in the municipalities themselves, which allows many residents to continue living in the same towns where they were born and depopulation is mitigated. With the permanence of the inhabitants, other problems related to population decline are also avoided, such as the loss of social services, leisure alternatives, etc.
The importance of the livestock-meat chain in the Spanish economy
The impact of the livestock-meat chain is also significant at the national level, where it contributes close to 44,000 million euros to the national GDP and generates 672,000 direct jobs. In addition, the activity mobilizes two million associated jobs that are framed in a varied selection of activities such as agricultural production aimed at feeding livestock and professionals in the veterinary, feed, animal health, logistics and transport and auxiliary industries.
Livestock activity takes place in more than 350,000 farms throughout the national geography that make a contribution of 16,000 million euros to Final Agricultural Production, according to data from the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food. In addition, during 2020, the Spanish meat industry put on the markets a total of 7.6 million tons of meats and 1.4 million tons of processed meat worth 27,957 million euros. With this production, Spain’s food sovereignty with regard to meats has been ensured and it has also allowed 3.2 million tons of meats and various processed products to be exported to markets around the world. These transactions have reached a value of 8,660 million euros, with a growth of 21% in foreign turnover and in volume with respect to the figures of the previous year. These figures have a special strategic relevance at a time when international trade is suffering a strong setback and where the livestock-meat chain has emerged as a guarantee to maintain the positive balance of the balance of payments.
How to join the Municipal Cattle-Meat Network
The municipalities that wish to be part of the Municipal Livestock-Meat Network must approve in the municipal plenary session an institutional declaration in favor of the meat-livestock chain and accompany this decision with a communicative action. All the necessary information about the process, the purposes of the Municipal Network and the contact form are available at the platform website.
The Municipal Network for the livestock-meat chain intends to be a reflection of the great diversity that exists in Spain. For this reason, it intends that in the medium term its members include localities from all geographical areas of the country and that they are governed by political forces of all kinds. In the expansion work of the initiative, demographic representativeness is also taken care of with the participation of municipalities of all sizes, including those under 5,000 inhabitants, where the positive impact of the activity is even more notable.