It is very curious to observe the ambivalences and contradictions that are expressed by the opinion of our interlocutors regarding the great problems of our time.
In fact, the confluence and impact of major transitions – climate and energy, ecological and food, digital and labor, demographic and migratory, geopolitical and security, tourist and cultural – create a kind of thick fog and do not let us see the time clearly. and the space of impact points.
This opacity and ambivalence are, therefore, a recurrent feature in our daily life together. If in current discourse it is still possible to reach a consensus, in terms of concrete achievements, finding a point of balance between the different life cycles of those transitions is an extraordinarily complex and difficult task.
This fact is very sensitive because it makes it problematic to have a consistent narrative about the direction and future of Algarve society, which is a discourse of positive and mobilizing hope. Let us look at some examples of these ambivalences and contradictions.
In Algarve society, perhaps the most ambivalent and contradictory perspective is the one that connects a scarce resource, water, with the dominant economic activities, tourism and intensive irrigated agriculture that consume a lot of water.
It is very difficult, at any given moment, to find the balance points between those activities and the production and consumption of water and, consequently, to program and carry out the necessary changes in relation to the models of touristification, intensive agriculture and water resources management.
Faced with a major paradigm shift, the actors directly involved seem to prefer the administration of shorter political cycles and, consequently, proceed by successive approximations, not surprising, therefore, that all Algarves feed, in varying doses, their own ambivalences. and contradictions according to their relative position as producers, workers and consumers.
Having said that, I just want to point out that, to the extent that Algarve society increasingly depends on intensive tourism and intensive agriculture and, therefore, on the direct and low-paid jobs created by these activities, the more the Algarve will become free raiders in their own region and thereby adding unintended effects, negative externalities and collateral damage to their own way of life and that of their fellow citizens.
However, they do not do so voluntarily, because they are simple workers and consumers, most of them poor, of a totally extroverted economic model that privatizes benefits and socializes losses, that retains little capital and tax revenue regionally, that sells increasing parts of its territory to groups and non-resident funds.
But ambivalences and contradictions arise in all the pairs of transitions mentioned at the beginning. The new climate regime, the carbon regime of the Anthropocene, leaves an immense cloud hanging over the next energy mix in the Algarve region and the ambivalence is evident as to the course that must be pursued.
The hesitations about agroecology, ecosystem services and protected landscape areas leave an immense cloud over the landscape system and the management of the regional agro-landscape mosaic with regard to a more diversified and less intensive agri-food model.
The great digital transformation and the labor regime of the main regional economic activities, where precarious and intermittent work predominates, leave an immense cloud over the region's per capita income and the great asymmetry of its distribution.
Demographics and migrations are a real unknown and at any time we can suffer strong erratic population movements from North Africa, but also from regulated movements originating in the CPLP, in addition to being able to witness an export of skilled labor to other destinations, in exchange for some digital nomads who come to enjoy the good weather in the Algarve.
International geopolitics and collective security, of which the war in Ukraine and the associated sanctions are the best example, leave an immense and dark cloud hovering over the flows of people, goods, services and capital, but also over the next order. International.
In this context, it is important to be aware and remember the extreme volatility of tourist flows. The recession in Europe in 2023 is a first warning to navigation.
Intensive tourism and the cultural and creative industries (ICC) are directly correlated and the formation of an ICC cluster in the region is increasingly likely in the short and medium term, however, be careful with the artificialization, gentrification and gamification of society Algarve, as we would not like it to become a society of precarious and intermittent visitors and workers, instead of a society of residents living a dignified life.
Final grade
Major transitions, due to their lasting asymmetric effects, require a regional prospective test to be carried out that is capable of listing and envisioning the main exogenous and endogenous variables of the regional development process that condition the course for the next decade, under penalty of of improvisation and navigation on sight, many mitigation and remediation measures, and few or no substantive reforms.
The decade of the PRR and the PT 2030, and what is missing from the PT 2020, will not be repeated, and it will be a crime against the country not to take advantage of these substantial funds to finally carry out structural reforms and the diversification of the economic base that Algarve society has been demanding for so long.
Without these reforms, there is a real risk of an economy sandwiched between intensive tourism and intensive agriculture, an increasingly richer region with increasingly poorer people.
Author António Covas is a Retired Full Professor at the University of Algarve
Comments