Forest externalities, demography and rural development in inland Spain

The maintenance of the rural population, culture and landscape and the conservation of natural resources are the priority objectives of the new European agricultural policy as defined in Agenda 2000 fundamentally through rural development actions aimed at encouraging the diversification of economic activities in the rural environment and the valorisation of existing natural resources and farms. Soria province is a clear example of the problem of depopulation in the mountainous areas of inland Spain. It also has an abundance of a number of natural resources, in terms of forest masses of great ecological and productive value, which over time have configured a socio-economic structure that is much better prepared to meet the demographic crisis that has been affecting non-forest areas over the past 50 years. In this work, we show that in areas where forest uses predominate as the basic element of the local economy (either directly through wood production or indirectly through the value of their recreational and environmental externalities) the fall in population has been noticeably less than in areas where livestock or agricultural activities predominate.