ESTIMATION AND GEOGRAPHIC DISTRIBUTION OF MARGINAL AGRICULTURAL LANDS IN SPAIN WITH BIOENERGY POTENTIAL

The term "marginal land" is usually referred to lands with biophysical constraints and with low economic competitiveness where farm margin of existing agriculture has been below production costs. In Spain, here are around 17 million ha. of crop land which 10 million are rain-fed herbaceous crop land that often present significant constraints. A methodology based on the identification of non-profitable lands combined with the determination and analysis of the biophysics factors in those lands has been developed. The final purpose is to identify areas where traditional food crops are not sustainable economically and where biophysics factors affecting to the low agricultural productivity, in order to eventually determine appropriate measures for land restoration as well as alternatives to the traditional food crops in those areas. The preliminary results obtained indicate that the arable land estimates marginal is about 2 million hectares. These lands could be used for energy crop and avoid farmers abandonment, implementing solutions economically viable and environmentally sustainable. The methodology developed for Spain can be a step ahead in the development of tools for identification of marginal lands and it also could be replicated in other countries, particularly to southern EU countries, where the situation is similar.