The making of peasant subalternity in Portugal: histories of marginalisation and resistance to agrarian modernisation

ABSTRACT

This paper examines how marginalised, small-scale family farmers have been facing the difficulties of agrarian modernisation in Portugal. Central to the history of contemporary peasants in this country is their continuous subordination to the power of agrarian capital and landed elites. But subaltern peasants have mobilised, particularly through CNA, a Vía Campesina member organisation, to build an oppositional project, not without tensions. The article argues that a Gramscian notion of subalternity offers a powerful lens to analyse the links between agrarian change, conflict and resistance for its focus on uneven power relations and by emphasising the centrality of social struggle.

KEYWORDS:

• Peasants
• subalternity
• agrarian movements
• food sovereignty
• Common Agricultural Policy
• Southern Europe
• Portugal

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to the two reviewers for their constructive comments that have helped me to improve the paper. I would like to thank also to Annette Desmarais and Irmak Ertor for their insightful suggestions on an early version of this article. I also wish to thank Irina Velicu, Stefania Barca, and Andreea Ogrezeanu for their support and valuable advice. Thanks to Zoe Brent for proofreading the article. This research would not have been possible without the contribution of CNA and all the respondents.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Here I use PAC instead of the english acronym, CAP so as not to be confused with the Confederação dos Agricultores de Portugal (CAP), introduced in section 3.1.

2 Farms between 5 and 50 hectares are 24% of total farms (INE 2017), whereas medium economic size farms are only 8% of total farms (INE 2021).

3 More recent statistical data indicate that around 34% of farms still produce mostly for self-consumption (INE 2021).

Additional information

Funding

This work is funded by FEDER - European Regional Development Fund through COMPETE 2020 - Competitiveness and Internationalization Operational Program “POCI-01-0145-FEDER-029355” and by national funds through FCT - Foundation for Science and Technology, PTDC/GES-AMB/29355/2017.

Notes on contributors

Rita Calvário

Rita Calvário is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre of Social Studies, University of Coimbra, Portugal. She is co-editor of The Political Ecology of Austerity (Routledge, 2021), and co-author of Solidarities from Below in the Making of Emancipatory Rural Politics: Insights from Food Sovereignty Struggles in the Basque Country (Sociologia Ruralis, 2020). She is also co-founder and editor of the Undisciplined Environments Collective (https://undisciplinedenvironments.org/). Her research focuses on small farmers’ movements, food sovereignty and justice, emancipatory politics, and political ecology.