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Portugal Land Tenure and Agrarian Reform
The system of land tenure on the eve of the revolution
was
anachronistic. Very large estates in the south-central
region
coexisted with peasant farming in minute, fragmented plots
in the
north. The small farms typically were owner-operated, with
the
proprietors' families clustering in villages. Absentee
landownership characterized the latifundio system with
day-to-day
operations in the hands of estate managers. Because of the
high
concentration of ownership in the south-central provinces,
nearly
half of the country's agricultural labor force in 1973
consisted
of landless wage-earning rural workers whose standard of
living
was extremely low.
Holdings of over 200 hectares (about 0.3 percent of the
total
number) accounted for 39 percent of all farm land, whereas
at the
other end of the scale holdings of less than one hectare
(about
39 percent of the total) represented no more than 2.5
percent of
total Portuguese farm land.
The Agrarian Reform Law of July 29, 1975, which laid
down the
principles for the expropriation of land, validated de
facto land
seizures by rural workers that actually had begun five
months
earlier. The law provided that expropriation should apply
to
rural estates in the "intervention zone" south of the Rio
Tejo.
Lands that could have been expropriated under the
provisions of
the Agrarian Reform Law amounted to 1,640,000 hectares,
but the
area occupied by the rural workers reached only 1,140,800
hectares, or about one-fifth of the country's total farm
land. On
the occupied land, 449 "collective production units" were
set up,
bringing various estates of the former owners under a
single
peasant directorate. Major expropriations took place in
the
districts of Évora, Beja, Portalegre, Setúbal, and
Santarém (see
table 8, Appendix). Very large collective farms were
formed in
Portalegre and Beja (averaging between about 3,500 and
4,200
hectares); smaller units were created in Santarém and
Setúbal
(averaging between about 860 and 1,180 hectares).
As Portugal shifted toward moderation and the political
center, collectivized agriculture increasingly was
perceived as a
counterproductive approach to the problems of the rural
south. By
the middle of 1990, only one-tenth (104,000 hectares) of
the more
than 1,080,000 hectares taken from the original landowners
was
still in possession of the remaining 30 collective farms.
The
gradual decollectivization of agriculture, which began in
modest
form in the late 1970s, culminated in a reformed agrarian
law
enacted by parliament in late 1988. Under its provisions,
the
maximum size of properties eligible for reprivatization
was
increased, and land could be divided among the heirs to an
estate. Many collective farm members agreed to accept cash
payments from the original owners in order to facilitate
change
of ownership or received individual titles to small shares
of the
former collective production units.
Data as of January 1993
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