Agriculture in Drylands: Experience in Almeria

Abstract

The fundamental basis for security and peace in a territory is linked to the absence of internal and external conflicts. Situations of internal conflicts in modern societies normally have their immediate origin in social inequalities and are expressed in an unjust distribution of wealth. The causes that determine these inequalities may be derived from environmental situations, as is the case with the exhaustion of natural resources which assured the existence of a community; they may also be due to the abandonment or isolation of social groups who are then deprived of the possibility of developing their own capacities to access resources, as a result of administrative or political irredentism. They may even derive from the installation of external models of socio-economic exploitation, as is the case of 19th century colonialism, which drained the resources of territories without promoting the socio-economic development of their inhabitants.