Monoland
Portuguese writer Avels Redol’s once described Alentejo as:
“Nem sequer a alvura de urna aldeia ou os seios de um monte. Para o sul só planicie e céu — céu e planicie”.
“Not even the whiteness of a village or the breasts of a mountain. To the south, only plain and sky—sky and plain”.
—(REDOL 1939)
Imposed by Estado Novo regime(1933-1974), Alentejo was designated as the “bread-basket” of Portugal(Almeida 2013). While dedicated to achieve national food sufficiency, this policy ingrained rural poverty, also stimulated waves of inland migration. Mobilised landless Gaibéus from central and northern Portugal to the South to work as seasonal agricultural labor.
The long oppression of the farmers and the proletariat ignited the Carnation Revolution— a resistant act from the Gaibéus and the landless community(Osuna 2014). Restraint by the limited technical and financial proletariat, this agrarian reforms did not change Alentejo’s agrarian resource scarcity after 1974. Even Portugal’s integration into European Economic Community, Alentejo still has not reverse the land damage and social inequalities.
In addition, joining the EEC did not change the situation. Common Agricultural Policy(CAP) subsides reinforced segregation between farms base on farm production, coded land characteristics by the regional production , accelerated farm stratification, land abandoned and rural depopulation. Rather than dismantling the Latifúndio, these transformation laid the groundwork for the modern financial monoland(Viegas 2023).
Today, apart from the water inequality, Alentejo is undergoing a deeper land erasure. Large-scale land concentration now exceeds the historical latifundia, driven by international investment, irrigation infrastructure, and export-oriented farming.
Since 2012, international investment in farmland(Van der ploeg 2015) has transformed 70 percent of Alentejo to monoculture olive groves (Almeida 2020). The number of farms with over 100 hectares of agricultural land in the Alentejo multiplied sevenfold between 1998 -2015(Silveira 2018). The transaction of the land is based on local land owners or marginalising the small farmers through the inequality of resources concessions, including the finance-prioritised irrigation policies, production biased, allocation of farming compensations by “hostage” Montados(Pinto-Correia 2018).
During one of our visits to Ana Carla Gouveia, an organic olive farmer in Alentejo, described a pattern of oppression for being a unconventional farmer in Alentejo.“You have to make sure [the Cooperatives] will process your olives”. The nature of current institutional arrangements is directly depend on the sales channel, only the smaller farms are completely rely on the sales channels bargain, and must also adapt to the processing schedules set by Cooperatives(Silveira 2018). Consequentially, due to smaller farmers’ production difficulties , shortage of technical, management knowledge and Cooperatives dependency. They are facing to lease or sell their land.
The expansion of super intensive plantation stress the soil to bear the mono planting system has changed the soil composition and the landscape(Roxo 2023). Knowing the land characteristic in Alentejo, these economic driven political and ecological change are accelerate the desertification of Alentejo, and erase the diversity of ecological systems, including isolating Montados(Simonson 2018), and erasing other forms of plants in the field such as Poejos(Pennyroyal) in Açorda.
The current land in the Alentejo region can be categorized as a non-opposing dualism: land that can be mechanised, or not yet to be mechanised. Erosion of traditional farms is the first step toward monoculture land, it is a manifestation of removing an agricultural ideology that believes in foraging, biodiversity as also parts of agriculture and daily life. Rural landscape in Alentejo is reconfigured to exclude forms of life without economic value through water and land stratification. Sponsored by investors, profiler holders, erasing people, plants, and land into unilateral rifts for olive shrubs that allows no other forms of life in between— shaping the land to the ground of Agricultural Fascism.