The Portuguese agrarian reform and the peasant movements: a critical revision

Abstract

The main target of this article is to analyse how the processus of agrarian reform has been developped in Portugal, after the April revolution in 1974 and to verify if a processus of rural development has been launched. It is a work of reckoming and not of a mere description of facts. Three years, within a processus of agrarian reform, are indeed a period too short to let formulate definitive conclusions. Nevertheless some important results have been obtained, even with some mistakes, and these results let us say that the balance is positive. The abolition of the latifundia system created the necessary conditions for accelerating the development, or rural zones. But the rural development only be effective if it will be supportted by the political institutions. The first priority must now be to achieve and complete the consolidation and expropriation of lands, according to the law. In these expropriated lands one must place smal producers, not in the collective units of production that they reject, but giving them individual lots that may let them to enlarge their small proprieties and develop the use of family manpower. Once achieved the consolidation of the agrarian reform with the effective participation of the rural masses, the rural extension, the agricultural planning and policy must be coherent as to the new agricultural structure in order that they may promote a dynamic rural development. But the stop recently suffered by the processus of agrarian reform kept down what, though with mistakes, already was a beginning of rural development in Alentejo.