A group of academics, including the Algarve's António Covas and João Guerreiro, decided to give their testimony about the fires and the development of the interior; made a manifesto based on several contributions, which was discussed in Coimbra on the 16th of November, and will now be delivered to the President of the Republic and the Prime Minister and distributed by the media.
Today, November 23, there will be a press conference in Coimbra, for the public presentation of the manifesto. O Sul Informação publishes the document here, as a way of supporting this initiative by Portuguese academics.
Public Manifest
This text is the contribution of a group of researchers from various disciplines who are dedicated to the study of Portuguese society, giving special attention to the issues of territories, forests, family farming, the development of rural spaces, public administration and social responsibility and politics.
It is the result of a public roundtable, held at the Faculty of Economics of the University of Coimbra on the 3rd of November last.
What motivated this reflection was the conviction that the fires that have plagued the country (particularly those of this year 2017) require a clear awareness of the link between the tragedy and the growing weakening and dislocation of a large part of the national space, of their ways of life and the economies that exist there.
We are facing a complex, multidimensional phenomenon that reveals several problems: agricultural economies, the forest, rural spaces, the landscape, non-urban territories, the territories of fragile urban centers.
The proposals presented here call for an integrated and structural action centered on rural areas and on the forest, on agriculture, on the landscape and on the strengthening of small and medium-scale urban economies themselves.
Therefore, a radical change is required in the way the country has treated its territory, directing us now to its reconstitution as a subject endowed with productive capacities and articulated among itself through public action.
Consequently, the Portugal 2020 Operational Programs, including the PDR, are of exceptional importance, which must be called upon to finance actions with effects in the medium and long term.
1. Intervene with urgency with a long-term meaning
The raging fire overflowed from the forest and broke down our doors, not only in remote places, but in medium-sized urban spaces, reaping lives and livelihoods, forests and scrubland, cultivated fields and industrial equipment.
What more is needed to awaken the country from a prolonged complacency with economic and demographic trends considered to be inescapable of concentrating on competitiveness poles alongside abandonment in territories considered to be marginal?
If there are catastrophes capable of awakening consciences and a sense of collective responsibility, the one that took place this year must be one of them. The risks are too visible to be ignored.
The destruction could compel a significant part of directly affected populations, more aware of the dangers and deprived of livelihoods, to seek refuge in supposedly more protected urban areas.
The short-term impact can thus add cumulatively to the structural causes that are at the origin of the catastrophe, making it even more difficult for the medium and long-term responses that always presuppose the population of the territory.
When acting in line with what the sense of responsibility requires, it is therefore essential to combine two lines of action: on the one hand, urgent restorative intervention, capable of regenerating – rebuilding houses, factories and social equipment, reforesting land, avoiding collateral damage, thus containing new demographic ebbs; and on the other hand, the longer-term reforming action, aimed at correcting local structural biases that can be solved and adapting to changes of global reach, namely climate change.
2. There is no solution without people
Democratic Portugal created a reductive vision of urbanization and dangerously exploited it. He allowed the idea to progress that everything could be based on each city and that each was self-sufficient. The public provision of welfare services in rural areas and in other small environments was neglected and there was no judicious investment.
The improvement of life, health, work and education, as well as the ease of transport or the right to vacations and fair leisure were not related to agriculture and other activities in rural areas.
Now, villages, places or even isolated houses are not demographic leftovers, meaningless data.
These fellow citizens who live in them, after all, who are they? They are the “resistants by choice”, those who, having the power to choose, chose to stay among their own and, since then, have not changed their life path. They are also the “resistant ones for lack of an opening”: children of the land trapped by chains and who so far have not dared to flee.
Finally, they are also the “neo-resistants”, those newly returned to the land in which they were born or grew up. After leaving for the city (in the country or abroad) and after a life of hard work and little leisure, they return to the root village, from which they never affectionately left.
Ignore these people who insist on staying where they are now - on the spot in rural areas – and belittling new residents will only aggravate the social risk of fires and will dig the entire country's grave more quickly.
It is therefore demanded that public policies use throughout their cycle (from design to evaluation) action methodologies that take into account the perception of problems by these people and that they interpret resistance as warning signs to detect and prevent negative effects that you are not aware of.
3. Forest organization, forestry models and associations: forest sustainability
The forest is undoubtedly at the center of the problems and actions to be taken. Private property and its fragmentation into small-scale exploration units, namely in the North, Center and part of the South of the country, are predominant.
The negative profitability of many forest spaces for their owners explains a large part of their "abandonment", a situation that has been worsening since the middle of the last century, although these spaces continue to generate a positive social benefit due to the environmental services they provide to the community and that the negative accounting of their holding does not register.
From the recognition of these facts, very precise public policy priorities arise, namely those that reorganize forest production through the promotion of forms of grouped management and that value the multifunctionality of forest spaces, supporting producers who organize themselves in this sense.
For this purpose, funds from the Permanent Forest Fund must be allocated through medium-term program contracts (subject to independent evaluation), complemented with resources from local authorities, forest producers and other agents.
The active involvement of the autarchies, desirably at the inter-municipal level, is essential for the promotion of these forms of grouped management and the positive role they must play in the execution of Municipal Master Plans and Forest Fire Defense Plans.
Program-contracts that promote grouped forest management must encourage the capacity for strategic and participatory planning of the organizations that promote them, and must be integrators of support measures in this area (eg sappers, ZIF, certification, registration, plant health, technical advice, training and research, etc.).
To this must be added the resolution of legal bottlenecks that allow the perpetuation of undivided inheritances and forms of property division that make the active management of land difficult; as well as the availability of instruments of a legal, fiscal and other nature that avoid situations, legally proven, of properties whose owners are unknown or, if they are known, have behaviors that hinder this collective effort.
4. Sustainable family farming: the productive base of living territories
Portugal has a very diversified territory and a plural agriculture consisting of a mosaic of agricultural systems.
Family farming has a relevant social, economic and territorial expression, as it represents 97% of the total number of farms, occupies 56% of the Agricultural Area Used (SAU), contributed 42% to the Total Production Value (VPT) and has a lot of weight expressive in Beiras, Trás-os-Montes, Minho and Algarve, regions of low density that have lost population and with low levels of professional and technical knowledge. It is also these regions that have the largest burned areas.
The Ministry of Agriculture of successive governments has seen family farming as residual agriculture, unfeasible from an economic point of view, granting it financial support of a social nature, in essence, a policy with no prospects for development.
The current situation is one of rupture, as it is not possible to find viable solutions in regions where family farming predominates with the dominant model of development that has large exploitation as its reference – a policy that favored about 3% of existing farms (the farms of large economic dimension) where most investments and support to producers are concentrated.
There are alternatives, as demonstrated by examples from regions in other European countries, where the modernization of family farming has increased production, its valorization and improved living conditions for farmers, investing primarily in innovation and applied agricultural research, in the offer of innovations. technical and institutional adapted to these explorations, supported by public financing.
The development of agriculture is only possible with the cohabitation of two models, that of large exploitation and that centered on family farming. The issue is eminently political, as it is at stake the sharing of public financing, investments, payments to producers and territorial and sectoral organization models to support development.
5. The forest, the vital ecosystem and environmental valuation
We need a forest that ensures a balance between the economic function of forestry productivity and the conservation of the multiple resources that make up our vital ecosystem. These are essential goods and many services that we do not value: the quality of air, water, the soil that is the substrate of life.
Caring for and valuing forest ecosystems is a condition for the country's wealth and quality of life for the Portuguese, it is important to promote native species and the diverse composition of the forest.
We propose an integrated program to support the villages, each one understood as a community; the adoption of new models of governance, formal and informal, that bring public decisions closer to people and that provide more integrated solutions to the specific problems of these socio-territorial spaces; a persistent commitment to raising awareness and training communities to prevent risky situations; a commitment to building another forest, supported by new forestry models, in the conversion into diversified landscapes and in the valorization of bush and uncultivated areas; the energy valorization of biomass, which should benefit from the national plan for biorefineries proposed by the government under the forest reform
In turn, other productions in rural spaces cannot compete with the distribution and market logics imposed on them. Small economies of local scale are thus condemned to the margins of viability and agricultural holdings relegated to abandonment.
The resulting context does not motivate the establishment of new agents. It is important to transfer knowledge and stimulate innovation in rural areas, based on new production, new models and production techniques and a fairer commercial basis for the respective products and services.
It is necessary that the contracting for the supply of goods and services that originate in rural areas is considered and formatted differently by all public entities that make use of them.
6. Remaking a detached national territory: choosing a territorial order and thinking about the entire country
We need to know what territorial order is being lived in and what use of territory is being made. This is an essential choice that must be clarified and cannot be subtracted from public awareness.
The fundamental deliberations contained in the PNPOT-National Program for Spatial Planning Policy, taken unanimously in the Assembly of the Republic, have been systematically ignored or contradicted.
The fires for a long time, and especially this year, have exposed the enormous weakening of many territories in the country, of different nature, and the deep crisis of articulation and territorial solidarity in Portugal.
Rural communities, small urban agglomerations and even medium-sized cities have become forgotten objects of public policy, which took refuge in mere measures of decentralization to the municipal or inter-municipal scale, while affirming a unipolar development model, of metropolitan scale and based on the concentration of human resources, largely precarious and with low salaries. In our contemporaneity, the country has never been so unequal from a socio-territorial point of view.
We now need to ensure that the whole country is looked at – not just for the sake of solidarity, but also as a condition of efficiency.
In order to live and work in economies that the territory itself organizes and develops, it is necessary to strengthen the urban fabric and articulate the infrastructures, look at the spaces we usually designate as rural and see them as places where production can be developed. and the valorization of its resources and its inhabitants, assuming the importance of having political interlocutors on a regional scale and not just municipal or inter-municipal, reconfiguring the public administration so that it exists for the territory and to act on its behalf. This has long been called integrated development.
7. An administration for the territory: public action and institutional capacity building
Public administration is today more disconnected from the territory and its problems. Multiple changes in the organization and vocation of deconcentrated services have disrupted the necessary proximity and organization of technical and professional skills in regional-based institutional headquarters.
The idea prevailed that public policy was sufficient to put financial resources to circulate, disseminate principles and regulations (generally of a European nature), and define the conditions that actors must comply with in order to be “eligible” or excluded.
However, there is still a need to conceive, coordinate, execute and evaluate policies for the development of territories, which is a mission of the public administration, taking into account its potential and the objectives that the country attributes to it.
The state cannot just decentralize difficult missions. It must itself assume territorially integrated interventions, establish institutional competencies and capacities, defining the appropriate levels (NUTS II or NUTS III) of coordination of relevant actions.
It is in this context that articulation and greater cooperation between the Government and Municipal Councils can be well established and strengthened.
16 November 2017
Signatories:
Agostinho Carvalho, Prof. University (Jubilee)
Américo Carvalho Mendes, Prof. Catholic Porto Business School Associate; President of the Sousa Valley Forestry Association
António Covas, Prof. Algarve University
António Louro, President Forum Florestal
Helena Freitas, Professor of Coimbra University; former Coordinator of the Mission Unit for the Enhancement of the Interior
João Guerreiro, Prof. Algarve University
José Castro Caldas, Researcher at the Center for Social Studies (UC)
José Portela, Prof. UTAD (Retired)
José Reis, Prof. Faculty of Economics (UC); former CCRC President
Manuel Brandão Alves, Prof. ISEG (UL) (Retired)
Pedro Bingre Amaral, Prof. Polytechnic Institute Coimbra
Pedro Hespanha, Researcher Center for Social Studies (UC)
Victor Louro, Forestry Engineer; former President National Commission to Combat Desertification
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