Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism

The Campaign meant, once and for all, an end to the uncultivated lands of Alentejo, a major topic for every Portuguese politician who had promised to increase the productive output of the country since the nineteenth century.[45] The heathlands that occupied two thirds of the region in 1864 were definitely gone by 1930, with sharecroppers assuming the status of heroes in this epic reclamation of the southern plains as asserted by popular songs and political rhetoric.[46] Possessing no more than a pair of mules and a plow, and paying back to the large estate owner between one seventh and one third of the crop, they were attracted by the high grain prices of a protected national market as well as by the subsidy paid by the Campaign for each hectare of newly cultivated land. While the large landholder contracted directly wage laborers to work the deeper clay soils of the property (the barros), the sharecroppers were directed to the terras galegas (the poorer schist thin soils at the peripheries of the estates).[47] Traditionally, the terras galegas, which constituted about 85 percent of the total area of the province, had been left uncultivated as heathlands or had been under a regime of long fallow.

In spite of the natural lack of phosphorus in the soil, the terras galegas had a rich reserve of nitrogen and organic matter supplied by the shrubs covering the heath. The growing availability of fertilizers from chemical companies like CUF made it possible to correct the phosphorus deficits and to integrate these uncultivated lands into Portugal’s grain economy. As a result of intense use of thin soils in the Wheat Campaign, severe erosion problems and decreased productivities would surface in the 1950s and the 1960s, driving away many of the sharecroppers who had first reclaimed them. But in 1934 and 1935 the fascist New State could boost that for the first time in the country’s long history the national soil gave bread to every Portuguese.

It is hard to underestimate the role of chemical fertilizers in the political economy of the large estates—the latifundia—that dominated Alentejo. While sharecroppers could reclaim thin soils only because of the new availability of phosphates, the deep clay soils explored directly by the landowners under wage labor regime also demanded careful use of fertilizers to correct their very variable mineral composition. This tripartite social structure—landowners, sharecroppers, and wage laborers—found in chemical fertilizers an important material basis not only for its survival but also for its expansion.[48] Against all the reformers who insisted that only division of the latifundia would make settlement of the scarcely populated Alentejo possible, and who were willing to reproduce the model of the country’s northern provinces with rural populations thriving on small and intensely cultivated plots of land, the large landholders, for whom Pequito Rebelo was probably the most eloquent spokesman, argued that the large estate was the organic unit best adapted to the conditions of southern Portugal. Proving their point, the province would experience, as a result of migration from other areas of the country, a sustained increase of population until the 1950s.[49] The migrants didn’t settle as new independent small farmers, instead integrating the latifúndio system. Most of them secured some land, but only very small plots that couldn’t guarantee the sustenance of a household; as a result, they had to work in large estates, either as sharecroppers or, if they didn’t possess animals, as wage laborers. Following Integralists and their corporatist ideas of social harmony, the latifúndio materialized thus in the landscape the encounter between all members of the community, rich and poor, landlord and sharecropper, worker and foreman.