Fundación Monte Mediterráneo was founded in 1994 as a private cultural foundation and registered under the number A-26/S.E. in the register for foundations in Andalusia; today it is registered as an environmental foundation under nº HU-521 in the same register. Since 1995 the foundation is based on the 700 hectare sized Dehesa San Francisco, a typical landscape in Southern Spain formed mainly by cork and holm oaks in the Nature Park Sierra de Aracena y Picos de Aroche, province of Huelva. Since 1996 the whole farm is certified organic.
The agro-eco-system "Dehesa" is composed by agriculture, livestock husbandry and forestry, means, it is agro-silvo-pastorile.
Besides the classical fields of activity, Fundación Monte Mediterráneo has opened up to new ones, such as organic gardening.
Fundación Monte Mediterráneo´s activity is mainly based on three ideas which complement each other in a synergetic way.
In the first place, the "Dehesa" is ecologically defined as "the last barrier to the African desert", - Fernanda dos Santos Amaro, Lisboa, 1992. It contains jewels of biodiversity and natural wealth of species which are often hard to find in other European countries or have even disappeared there.
Therefore it is not just an Andalusian matter since desertification and land degradation is a worldwide known and accepted threat.
Especially Spain and its Southern regions appear quite often in studies on the effects of land degradation and desertification. (UN, Unesco, German Society for International Cooperation, GIZ, etc.).
The solution formula to manage the agro-eco-system – point no. 2 - is livestock husbandry: if we want the Dehesa to survive as an eco-agro-system with an extensive agro-silvo-pastorile management system, we need to count on the people who live in and on it: farmers with livestock husbandry.
The economic viability of the farms decides on how attractive the profession of a farmer is in the future. In other words: the farms will only survive if the agro-silvo-pastorile management system is able to provide enough income to their owners. This would include that farmers are being paid for producing biodiversity, caring for the natural resources and nature conservation.
Of course it is right that the development of marketing projects and especially the direct marketing of farm products from the Dehesa are decisive. If a farmer, apart from producing biodiversity as a social service, also produces high quality food he should be correctly rewarded for all that and not be obliged to compete with industrial products proceeding from large-scale animal husbandry or industrial agro-production available on the market.
This requires – as the third point – the professionalization and modernization of the sector, so that farmers turn out being well trained professionals acquainted with modern technology such us cell phones, Internet, PDA, GPS, etc. This is the only way to equal the social prestige of farmers producing biodiversity and high quality food to other professions which are usually better regarded since they realize their activity in offices and behind computers.
