PEOPLE LIVING in rural areas, including foreign property owners, will have to do something with their land or rent it out to others.
This is one of the main consequences of a new financial incentives programme for people living in the rural areas of the country due to be announced by the Portuguese Minister for the Agricultural sector, Jaime Silva, next month.
The proposal comes under the new Plano de Desenvolvimento Rural (PDR), a programme for rural development that will endeavour to get funds from European Union.
Money for future rural projects will come from the Fundo Europeu Agrícola de Desenvolvimento Rural (FEADER), the European Union programme that aims to provide sustainable development of the rural world, supported by Quadro Comunitário de Apoio (QCA), a global financial scheme for the EU between 2007 and 2013.
One aspect of the PDR programme that will affect people the most is one related to private properties in rural areas.
It wants more effective, but sustainable, rural occupation and to achieve this will try to encourage owners to utilise their properties more commercially by selling or renting them to those who really want to live and work in the land.
People who ignore this request and abandon their properties will be penalised under legislation being prepared.
Huge concern
The Portuguese government believes this will help fight, what it calls the “human desertification” of the country, which it says is becoming a huge concern for the regional political representatives and for scientists.
Some people, however, believe that the desertification problem has been aggravated in recent years by political decisions leading to the closure of small local health centres, schools and other public services.
These decisions, they say, have pushed younger people in to urban areas, where they can find work and also a wide range of basic services that are disappearing from the countryside.
International figures from OECD show that rural areas make up 92.7 per cent of Portugal, with 46.3 per cent being used by agriculture, 26.4 per cent by forests and 20 per cent as natural public parks.
According to the latest statistical data on population density, very isolated rural areas had 35 habitants per squared kilometre in 2002, while the rural areas had 132 habitants per squared kilometre. In the same year, urban areas registered 717 habitants per squared kilometre.
The same statistics say that 69.8 per cent of Portuguese parishes are in rural areas.
In terms of revenues, OECD says that gross income per capita in those rural areas represent around one third of that in the urban areas and that the population is very old and with poor working skills.
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