cultivar_22_Final_EN

Depopulation in rural areas: between inevitability and the ability to change 45 ty-economy relationship able to maintain positive demographic dynamics. The demographically perverse effects of two generations of agricultural modernisation Alongside the effect of the exhaustion of a model of rural society unable to respond to negative ecolog- ical circumstances and isolation, and which public attempts at domestic settlement were unable to counteract, must be added the impacts of the coun- try’s late modernisation, in particular from the 1950s onwards. In contrast to the dominant rural society of the time, there emerged a two-tier society, to use Adérito Sedas Nunes’ term: on the one hand, an attractive emerging modern urban and industrial country, with increasing infra- structure and higher levels of education and literacy; on the other, a demographically, economically and socially contracting country with a traditional rural society afflicted by emigration and migration to the cities, by declining agriculture, and by poor accessibility and phys- ical and social mobility. It is in this context that the word “interior” became widespread as a term to denote the opposite of “coastal” rather than the more traditional definition of “inland”, i.e., those areas which were neither along the coast nor the border. Farming mechanisation, growing competition from imported foodstuffs and the social image of agricul- ture as “yesterday’s” sector, and thus unappealing to young people, competed among other factors to exacerbate the demographic decline of municipali- ties where exhaustion of the traditional rural model was felt earlier, spreading afterwards to many others where agriculture played an important social and economic role. The emergence of an urban-industrial society and technical-scientific advances reshaped the inter- actions between ecology, community and the economy in rural areas, with evident demographic impacts. On the one hand, farming modernisation aimed to overcome ecological limitations, introduc- ing species deemed more suitable and new forms of land use and water management. At the same time, agricultural production gradually moved away from local communities, dismissing its knowledge and even its people. In sum, the economy of agricultural and agrifoods systems sought to “free itself” from local ecological and social restrictions, recreating interactions where productivity gains and competi- tiveness implied a radical shrinkage in the farming population and, more generally, a growing decou- pling between rural areas and agriculture. What thus emerged was what some have called the post-agri- cultural rural society, not in the sense that farming had become irrelevant but rather to stress its loss of social, economic and politi- cal importance in structuring rural areas. In recent decades, more intensive and super-intensive farming using increasingly sophisticated precision solu- tions – as well as ever more complex production and con- sumption networks organ- ised by diverse and powerful actors at a multiscale level that far surpasses regional and national borders – have further exacerbated the divorce between the economy component and the ecology and commu- nity components in large areas of rural Portugal. Given these two waves of modernisation in agricul- tural and agro-industrial production and the agri- food production-distribution-consumption chains, and in a context in which the so-called post-agricul- tural rural society is clearly finding it hard to create alternative economic systems beyond rural and nature tourism, the demographic decline of many rural areas seems inevitable. In some cases, this is also a consequence of dismantling what remains of the old rural societies and in others a result of pro- duction regimes that dispense with local people and use seasonal labour from distant countries (East- … the economy of agricultural and agrifoods systems sought to “free itself” from local ecological and social restrictions, recreating interactions where productivity gains and competitiveness implied a radical shrinkage in the farming population and, more generally, a growing decoupling between rural areas and agriculture.