From the swine to the sausage: labor time, appropriation of nature, and socio-environmental conflict in intensive pig farming

Abstract

This article is based on research on territorial logic and the definition of nature according to the pig production industry. It was drafted following qualitative fieldwork conducted in the Southeast Spanish region of Murcia between 2022 and 2024. We use the extraction–exploitation nexus as the analytical framework to present the research results, understood as a way of organizing social space and time for capitalist valorization. The pig production chain organizes, articulates, and coordinates social space and time according to the intensity of the production rate. The extractive logic of the pig farming production chain is also discussed. We pose that the meat farm production chain defines a frontier of appropriation of cheap nature for the accumulation of capital, transforming rural spaces both into territories where essential resources (such as water) are appropriated for the operation of large-scale pig farms, and into drainage areas for unpleasant waste (bad odors) and contaminants (slurry). Lastly, we suggest that the extractive appropriation of cheap nature requires abstraction according to the logic of value, which contradicts the specific ways of life in the territory and its alternative forms of social valorization.