Intensive agriculture, marketing and social structure: the case of south-eastern Spain

The main purpose of this study was to analyse the opinions of farmers in the province of Almeria concerning the state of the fruit and vegetable sector, to learn about the main considerations in their decision-making processes when marketing their products and their assessment of the image of companies and cooperatives and to analyse the social structure of this collective. To that end, the analysis was conducted on three levels: a descriptive analysis on two levels - a quantitative analysis of the socio-demographic, socio-economic and marketing characteristics of farmers in the province of Almeria and a qualitative analysis based on the opinions of farmers and a group of experts in the sector; and an explanatory analysis, based on a binary logistic regression model, to show how decision-making occurs in the marketing dialectic, whether it either be at the source (auction) or the end-point (cooperative). The conclusion is that the marketing variables that are most tied to context - such as price, timeframe or certification - better explain the decision-making process of farmers in the province of Almeria when marketing their products, both for cooperative members and for those who sell their products in alhondigas (traditional auction houses).