Estrategias de supervivencia del caserío vasco. (Survival strategies of family farms in the Basque Country)

The agriculture of the European Community is going through an important process of change. There is a number of important factors, such as the Common Agricultural Policy, which force farms to carry out a series of productive changes.

This thesis analyzes the changes introduced by dairy family farms in the Basque Country (Spain) between 1980-96. There have been several types of changes or strategies for survival, like increasing the volume of production, improving existing equipment, direct sale of milk to consumer, migration, a shift towards a part-time agriculture, and the reduction of farm costs and/or familiar consumption. Since not all the farms chose to introduce the same strategies, the aim of this research is to find out the reasons why they opt for one strategy or another.

The hypothesis proposed in this research is that the strategy adopted depends on the family"s reproductive project, that is, the household"s decision to use or not the farm as a means for earning a living for the children. In order to prove the above hypothesis, a typology of 7 families was elaborated as an indicator of possible family projects. To collect the necessary information some 308 surveys and 8 focus groups were carried out with farmers.

The results show that the designed typology of families can explain the implementation of the various strategies. The typology has also proved adequate in finding out the present differentiation of a Basque family and it also suggests answers to key issues for Agrarian Social Sciences such as the agrarian question, reasons for agrarian migration, the role of women in agriculture, the functioning of the family farm, or the problems derived from modernization in agriculture