Some background on our challenges...
Portugal is one of the poorest countries in the European Union. Portugal has a largely de-populated territory in the interior southern regions. For most of the 19th and 20th century the southern interior lands of Portugal have been in the hands of wealthy private ownership, either the church, land tenants, aristocrats, or agri-business investors. This situation had changed for a very brief period between 1974 and 1977, the years where the revolution followed the fall of the military dictatorship that lasted from 1926-1974, and saw the start of a process of popular land expropriation, that allowed peasants, local populations, and workers to try out a different relation to the lands where they were previously being exploited as wage slaves. This experience ended with the takeover of land by the state, which then through the re-liberalization of the economy gave back the expropriated lands to private wealthy ownership once again.
Since then this ownership has turned the land towards profit-making, by exploring capital intensive forms of agro or animal farming such as intensive olive monoculture, large extensions of cork production, large extensions of greenhouse horticulture, large scale pig or cow farming - many times intensive, large scale pine tree monoculture and vineyards. Many of these businesses rely on migrant slave, or wage slave, labor. As a complementary activity many large farms make extra profit from allowing hunting on their lands. The large land that has not been turned into intensive farming, has been turned into either touristic projects for the wealthy, like golf courses, rural eco-tourism, many times connected to vineyards, or is left unused.
In addition, there is the phenomena of the last decade where land purchase has been made more accessible to foreign investors, and taxes lowered for land owners based on their nationality. One result of this is that many southern countryside land parcels have been bought by rich european nationals from central and northern europe, to give themselves a primary or summer house in the south, while turning many of these holdings into tourist attractions. This reinforces neocolonial and racist practices that allow wealthy, privileged individuals to settle on a territory, while a few kilometers away vulnerable workers (both portuguese and immigrants from the global south) are enslaved to grow tomatoes as capitalist and neocolonial asymmetries reproduce themselves through land access and ownership.
The decades that followed the end of the dictatorship continued the trend of population loss that had begun to migrate to cities or abroad before the dictatorship ended. The owners of large reprivatized land not having so many easily-available low wage workers, and stimulated by the intensive agro-farming propaganda, opted for inputting more mechanical work and fertilizers for their lands, while complementing this when necessary with cheap labour. Also the automobile and the road became dominant features of the countryside, cutting across the old villages and lands and making it easier to use the countryside as a place to transport goods across, to visit on a weekend on the part of burgeoning middle classes forming in bigger cities on the coast, now becoming de-industrialized. All these changes accentuated the loss of local population and the break of the relationship between the inhabitants of south Portugal and the lands where once generations had lived.
These changes added much damage to the already degraded habitats of the south, furthermore considering the large scale and intensive agriculture promoted by Salazar’s state in Alentejo during the 30s for the cultivation of wheat, this made the land lose fertility and strained the already fragile water sources, accelerating the desertification and compaction of vast swathes of soil in the region, that are felt until this day. Alentejo is one the lowest rainfall regions in Portugal, and one that faces some of the biggest problems with access to drinking water sources for its inhabitants.
Since then this ownership has turned the land towards profit-making, by exploring capital intensive forms of agro or animal farming such as intensive olive monoculture, large extensions of cork production, large extensions of greenhouse horticulture, large scale pig or cow farming - many times intensive, large scale pine tree monoculture and vineyards. Many of these businesses rely on migrant slave, or wage slave, labor. As a complementary activity many large farms make extra profit from allowing hunting on their lands. The large land that has not been turned into intensive farming, has been turned into either touristic projects for the wealthy, like golf courses, rural eco-tourism, many times connected to vineyards, or is left unused.
In addition, there is the phenomena of the last decade where land purchase has been made more accessible to foreign investors, and taxes lowered for land owners based on their nationality. One result of this is that many southern countryside land parcels have been bought by rich european nationals from central and northern europe, to give themselves a primary or summer house in the south, while turning many of these holdings into tourist attractions. This reinforces neocolonial and racist practices that allow wealthy, privileged individuals to settle on a territory, while a few kilometers away vulnerable workers (both portuguese and immigrants from the global south) are enslaved to grow tomatoes as capitalist and neocolonial asymmetries reproduce themselves through land access and ownership.
The decades that followed the end of the dictatorship continued the trend of population loss that had begun to migrate to cities or abroad before the dictatorship ended. The owners of large reprivatized land not having so many easily-available low wage workers, and stimulated by the intensive agro-farming propaganda, opted for inputting more mechanical work and fertilizers for their lands, while complementing this when necessary with cheap labour. Also the automobile and the road became dominant features of the countryside, cutting across the old villages and lands and making it easier to use the countryside as a place to transport goods across, to visit on a weekend on the part of burgeoning middle classes forming in bigger cities on the coast, now becoming de-industrialized. All these changes accentuated the loss of local population and the break of the relationship between the inhabitants of south Portugal and the lands where once generations had lived.
These changes added much damage to the already degraded habitats of the south, furthermore considering the large scale and intensive agriculture promoted by Salazar’s state in Alentejo during the 30s for the cultivation of wheat, this made the land lose fertility and strained the already fragile water sources, accelerating the desertification and compaction of vast swathes of soil in the region, that are felt until this day. Alentejo is one the lowest rainfall regions in Portugal, and one that faces some of the biggest problems with access to drinking water sources for its inhabitants.