Maria Isabel has 83 years and is a criminal
The crime scene is the stove, and so has for many years: sells Orange cake in the café area. Without receipt. And still manages to go a step further: uses the eggs from her own chickens! Along with her daughter, forming a criminal organization.
Eusebia with 58 years, produces a small amount of goat cheese in her own kitchen that sells to neighbours at 1 euro per unit. One of the neighbours, José Manuel, uses the old clay oven in the backyard to bake bread, makes a lot more than he and his wife need to sell to friends, trying thus to complement the retirement pension he doesn't receive for sustainable living. Some of the older inhabitants of the village pick mushrooms and sell them to buyers. Again, without receipts. In turn, this intermediary distributes them in restaurants, going on receipts, but do it for twice the price they paid for them. Marta, owner of the coffee shop in the area, ordered the lettuce supplier but added some herbs and lettuce leaves from your own backyard. And if we asked a medronho brandy, typical of the area, when the official bottle, sealed with the fiscal tax is empty, her husband would calmly go to the garage and back filling the bottle with the homemade old Tomás fro. We can call this tradition, quality of life and colorful site - what is certain is that in times of crisis, self-sufficiency among neighbors, simply helps to survive.
The Alentejo is the regions most affected by the crisis which affected a whole country. Traditional agriculture is low, the industry is almost nonexistent and the tourists rarely let themselves be carried away by the spectacular coastal scenery of the province. The hills of Albertans are lost in ruins, gone away, leaving only the elderly population living in villages, and for the most part, the low value receiving pensions is spent on medicines, the first week of the month. Initially, people do what they have always done to try to survive somehow. Sell, to people who know, what they can themselves produce. Unable to bear the costs of receipts or invoices. To be able to start a business with a license, would have to comply with the requirements and make major investments that would compensate a business of greater production.
Unlike Spain, Portugal doesn't negotiate special deals for those with small businesses. The consequences: the entire production on a small scale-cafes, restaurants, shops and bakeries that make this country attractive-is in fact illegal. There are only two choices, or legalize the trade becoming major producers or remain as fugitives to the IRS. So far and in a way, this was acceptable in Portugal but at this point, it seems that the Government discovered the real culprits of the crisis: the modest man and woman modestly making a living as sinners in respect to taxes. As a result, the authorities closed a number of shops and markets where once were disposed of surplus parkas productions of small producers and processors, those who made some money with that, balancing the local economy.
A few months ago, the tax office finally decided to do something about unemployment: employed 1,000 new prosecutors. As a severe blow to the organized tax fraud, the authority recently autuou a common practice in the small village of mulberry trees: some men had as they did for decades-produced and sold charcoal. The criminals have an average of 70 years, and the modest income of coal barely allowed them to go more than a few times have a medronho or ask a bica.
Is not beneficial to stop local products and replace them with industrial products. Not for the State, with a population impoverished, who has no ability to pay taxes. And it is not good for health: what are not homemade products that lead to food scandals in recent years, with the chemical and microbial contamination of industrial production. Only large industries benefit from this policy, a policy that even supports the crisis. This being a country which undergoes increasingly dependence on imports, one day will not survive economically. It's reality, until it seems that globalization won: the abandoned plots of Alentejo were mostly leased to international agricultural industries, which use these fields for the cultivation of olive groves and intensive horticultural production in greenhouses. After a few years, soils become too contaminated. In General, the new temporary farmworkers come from Thailand, Bulgaria or Ukraine, work for a short time and return to their homes before illnesses become visible.
With the pressure of the Troika, the Government is acting against the interests of his own people. Just a few weeks ago, the municipality of Lisbon sent authorities to destroy yet another community garden in a charismatic neighborhood of the city, the "Garden of Mount" in the grace, where residents produced vegetables with success, enlisting the aid of the neighborhood. While residents of the neighborhood were protesting, city officials tore trees from the root and flower boxes, simply so that the land can be leased rather than sold. Once again, a part of self-organization was destroyed by the crisis. Most of the Portuguese does not accept this. In the last year and for several times, about 1 million people-equivalent to 10% of the population-protested against the Troika. Many demonstrate their creativity and determination during the civil disobedience: when he left the law that customers were required to request invoice in restaurants and cafes, instead of giving your tax number, 10 thousand people gave the number of the Prime Minister. Quickly this is no longer required. Also there are some Presidents of parishes that do not accept what has been done to their markets. And so the little village local markets continue but with a different name "Shows of local products", "Trade market". If someone wants to say something and then somebody puts money in the box of gifts as well who will stop him?!
There is a fascinating quote: "When the law is unjust, resistance is a duty." This is the case. Are no small producers that are wrong, but the authorities themsel who makes the decisions - both moral and strategically. Is it morally unjustifiable deny the daily survival of the elderly in the villages? And strategically stupid. A rare treasure is destroyed: a region that still has knowledge and traditional methods, and social cohesion communities enough to share and to help each other.
An economy that globally diffuses crisis-proof is what turns out to be criminalized: rural and regional subsistence-the power of self-organization of people who help each other, trying to sustain themselves with what grows around them. To face the crisis, there are no reasons not to move forward together and we meet again. Yes, there is every reason for us to help each other now, to choose self-sufficiency and community spirit. We can help to soften the crisis, at least for now - if not at least offer a key element in solving the stupidity. The more uncertain are the supply systems of the global economy, the more necessary are the regional livelihoods.
Therefore, we ask that all travellers and connoisseurs: call for regional dishes in restaurants. Eat the omelets are made by eggs that haven't been stamped or sealed. Have salads of their vegetable gardens. Even at parties or ceremonies, choose the products of your own manufacture, homemade. When entering a shop or café, announce immediately that you won't ask for receipts or invoices. Maybe soon, the owners of restaurants will join such a local change. Maybe soon, an employee of a store will be the first to realize that the donation box at the entrance brings more profit than the compulsory registration of sales recently imposed. Maybe soon, the first regional currencies appear as a method to circumvent tax laws.
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