Fatal Tractor Accidents in the Agricultural Sector in Spain during the Past Decade

Abstract

Currently, there is a discrepancy between the number of occupational accidents in the agricultural sector reported by Spanish governmental sources and those actually occurring in general. This is mainly due to the official definition of ‘occupational accident’ in the current regulations. In order to be able to analyse all fatal accidents involving tractors, other sources of information must therefore be used. In this study, we have collected the news published in different media during the period 2010–2019. Statistical models that take into account the spatial and temporal dependence of the data were used to estimate the rates of fatal accidents in the provinces of Spain using the Bayesian inference technique INLA (Integrated Nested Laplace Approximation). The results obtained showed that the total number of fatal accidents in that period was 644. The crude rates of fatal accidents per province ranged from 0 to 223.5 fatal accidents per 100,000 registered tractors. In addition, the overall rate for Spain as a whole was 6.87 fatal accidents per 100,000 tractors. As in other EU countries, it was found that the regions with the highest number of accidents were also related to steep terrain, to an older tractor fleet and to horticultural crops and vineyards.