Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism

Quintanilha was not shy when bragging about the accomplishments of his research center. Nine scientists aided by sixteen assistants plus the personnel of seven local experiment stations (16 technicians) and an unregistered number of “native auxiliaries,” were responsible for no less than doubling the Mozambique’s cotton output in twenty years of operation of the center, from 20,000 tons in 1940 to 40,000 tons in 1960. Significantly, this was accomplished while reducing the areas of land under cotton cultivation and the numbers of indigenous labor involved in the scheme (about half a million by the early 1960s). This was a dramatic increase in productivity, although still not covering Portugal’s needs, with the textile industry of the country booming in the early 1960s due to exports to northern Europe amounting to about 65,000 tons per year, versus 17,000 tons a year in the 1930s. According to Quintanilha, the explanation for the productivity boom was clear: better locations, better cultivation techniques, better plants. All improvements he directly related to CICA’s research.[118]

As it is usually the case in such schemes, its success was also the first cause for problems.[119] To protect cotton from having to compete with other crops for moisture, sunlight and soil, the Cotton Board officials imposed in the first years a monocrop system in contrast to traditional practices of growing different crops in the same plot of land, mixing maize, sorghum, beans or peas.[120] Concessions’ foremen only had to take a quick look at the field to realize if natives were complying or not to their obligation of growing cotton. The dismissal of the allegedly chaotic model of intermixing crops in favor of monocrop fields of cotton caused all sorts of environmental problems, including soil erosion and the spread of new pests such as red bollworm. As early as 1947, a report to the president of the Board of Export of Colonial Cotton supported the increasing evidence linking plant diseases and pests associated with the monoculture of cotton to the decline in food crops.[121] Such decline was also associated to the short periods of time natives were allowed to dedicate to their own households, occupied as they were with demanding cotton fields. More than that, the need for visual surveillance by foremen required the demarcation of cotton fields along the few roads crossing northern Mozambique, most of the times a long-way from natives villages. Soon, the diet basis of the local population was based on manioc, a less demanding crop but also a less nutritive one. Famines stared to show up in the cotton regions and in 1951 in the Mogovolas about 2,000 to 3,000 people died of starvation.[122]

Local catholic priests denounced the tragic events, and the very same General Governor of Mozambique asserted as well that the obsession with cotton production, separating it from the general issue of food security, was responsible for the spread out of famines in the northern regions.[123] It is no surprise than to find out that already in 1947 the Cotton Board, under the advice of CICA experts began promoting the construction of a network of planned cotton communities throughout the north of Mozambique, the “cotton concentrations,” multi-crop agriculture units organized around scientific principles of rotation and crop management and located on the best available land.[124] For indigenous people the main advantage of belonging to such communities was the opportunity to cultivate other crops along with cotton. In the carefully planned cotton concentrations, land rotation, access to better seeds and lands, and the opportunity to grow other crops were intended to overcome all previous problems. Each household received a plot with an area between five and seven hectares, half of which would be allowed to lie fallow at any time. On the remainder, peasants would cultivate a hectare of cotton, a hectare of corn or sorghum, and a hectare of manioc. The concentrations contemplated also an integral social structure with a primary school, a sanitary post, a fountain, and houses for the professor, nurse and overseer of the concession holder.[125]