Agrarian reform not a success in Portugal

Press, 3 July 1979, Page 17

Agrarian reform not a success in Portugal

By

J. W. MURRAY

Tn the north, a cheerful peasant woman walks her two cows twice a day to the co-operative milking parlour. In the south, a sunburned tractor driver sweats across the thousand arid hectares of a collective farm. These are the two faces of Portugal five years after the revolution which brought a frail democracy, four years since failure of the Communists to create a Cuba on the Atlantic. But the Communist spectre remains, largely because of their control of the trade unions and, particularly of the collective farms. Statistics in Latin countries are notoriously unreliable but there is virtual agreement that about a third of the active population works on the land. This is more than in any other country of the E.E.C., which Portugal has applied to join, and even more than the other two application countries, Greece and

Spain. Nearly half the small farmers and collective workers are illiterate. Many are refugees from the lost African colonies of Angola and Mozambique. The country is divided into two distinct farm economies by the river Tagus, which flows from the sierras of Spain into the Atlantic. North of that boundary is the minifundia, the land .of the tiny farms

averaging around two hectares and two or three cows, gradually diminishing under the inheritance laws. In Portugal, unlike other Mediterranean countries, girls inherit equally with boys but often sell their share to their brothers.

Women do most of the work on these smallholdings. The husband works in local industry, if he is

lucky enough to have a job in a country where unemployment is endemic. Portugal’s unemployment figures are meaningless. The overwhelming majority of school-leavers cannot find jobs and cannot be registered as unemployed or receive any dole until they have been in employment. Children who work on the family farm cannot register. One nine-year-old boy .on

a three hectare, five-cow mini-farm told me that he hoped to become a student at Lisbon University. His mother, who runs a tiny cooperative milking parlour, said immediately: “That is impossible. He has to prepare to inherit the farm.” The Minister .of Agricul-

ture (Professor Vaz Portugal) says the only answer to the problem of the fragmented farm

structure of the north is co-operation. The population here is conservative, both politically and agriculturally, but the cooperatives are beginning to win them over by results, however poor by European standards. South of the Tagus the problem is very different. This is the alentejo, the land of enormous estates of thousands of hectares, mainly wheat and cereals but with some cattle and pig herds, and the profitable cork-oaks. It is a sundrenched arid area where the former estate owners, often companies or absentee proprietors, spent little on irrigation or other investment. The wages of the workers were abysmally low. In the first 18 months of the revolution, the land workers, led by the Com-munist-controlled trade unions, transformed 480 estates, one million hectares, one-fifth of the land of Portugal, into collectives. In typical Portuguese style, there was little violence; the estate owners were either not there to resist or, where there was resistance, the “occupying forces” just went away and tried the next farm.

Many owners had taken action in anticipation of collectivisation by selling off farm machinery and slaughtering livestock, leaving the incoming occupiers with bankrupt and neglected holdings.

The trade unions controlling the collectivisation compounded the problems by insisting that each estate take on some of the local unemployed or workers who had previously been displaced by new machinery. The result is that the collectives are hopelessly overmanned, as well as lacking management and technical experience. The workers have benefited because their wages have doubled, but they are literally eating the seed com and in some cases stripping the cork-bark years in advance of ripening. The agrarian reform, which has been a touchstone of Portuguese politics since Salazar, has notably failed. The present Government’s attempt to return some proportion of the collectivised land to former owners is meeting with political and physical resistance and little agricultural success. The Ministry of Agriculture officials and advisory officers are not admitted to the collectives, which refuse to pay rent, taxes or interest on loans and credit provided by the Government. The World Bank has made $7O million available for improvement of agriculture in the alentejo but the funds remain untouched because the Government wants real agrarian reform first and does not want to prop up inefficiency and overmanning.