The Limits of Agricultural Growth in a Fragile Eco-System: Total Factor Productivity in Alentejo, 1750-1850

Abstract

This paper analyses the interaction between productivity and natural conditions, before the advent of an ‘agricultural revolution’, in a region with a ‘Mediterranean’ type of environment. Its aim is to ascertain how the agrarian economy of Alentejo, during the period 1750-1850, adapted to changing market incentives which were favourable to long run efficiency improvement. In particular, it seeks to determine whether in doing so it encountered ecological barriers such as mentioned above. On the one hand, conditions in this province of southern Portugal were never propitious for a very successful pursuit of agriculture. On the other, by the eighteenth-century and despite an arid climate and a poor soil, a strongly commercialised agriculture, with good connections to distant markets, had become firmly established. During the second half of the nineteenth-century, this long-tried system was finally transformed by technical change. Market access (railways and new roads) and production technology (light steel ploughs, chemicals, steam, new seed varieties and intensified forestry for cork extraction) led this process (Reis, 1993; Fonseca, 1996; 2004). The period we deal with here, however, is the century before this transformation took place, a time when Alentejo was clearly still an ‘organic economy’.