Salazar, the formula of Portuguese agriculture and state intervention in the primary sector

Abstract

This article is a product of other research by the author (on the corporate organization of farming and on the evolution of the organisms responsable for the economic coordination connected to it) and: a) analyses Salazar's successive and apparently contradictory positions on the «matter in question» from the deep, though gradual, reforms of the «The Cereal Question» (1916) to the ultra-protetionist, conservative swing of the 1930's (The Wheat Compaign) and to the furtive return to the original state of affairs which took place about a quarter of a century later at the hand of Correia de Oliveira, his minister and disciple; b) explains this evolution and compares it with international trade, emigration and the state's financial situation; c) puts forward the idea that the fall of Salazar's regime did not actually give rise to any fundamental changes in the problems which still depend on the same factors; for this reason it is not unnatural that conservative ultra-protectionism and liberalizing reformism still alternate in a cyclical dance in Portugal.