Paper short abstract:

The conflicts between agrarian interests and the conservation of the Doñana National Park are an expression of the transformation of the social form of exploitation of agrarian labour. Contradictory constructions of the “home market” in labour have been an integral part of this transformation.

Paper long abstract:

This paper addresses the construction of the elusive “domestic labour market” in Huelva, Spain. Huelva is home to Europe’s largest strawberry farming area and the beneficiary of Spain’s most important guest worker programme. It is also the region where the Doñana National Park, one of Europe’s most-well known protected wetlands is located. For several decades, the overexploitation of groundwater resources has fueled the confrontation between agrarian and conservation interests. The question of labour and employment have been at the center of this debate. In this paper I discuss the way in which the regional employment model is dependent on contradictory constructions of the labour market. On the one hand, the implementation of the guest worker programme has relied on the discursive and administrative creation of national and regional labour scarcity. On the other, the environmental conflicts arising from the regional agricultural model have been dependent on the construction of natural resource extraction as a source of job creation and productivity. When looked at through the lens of the construction of the labour market, the articulation of the conflict between development and conservation is revealed as the history of the transformation of the social form of exploitation of agrarian labour.