Every Day Is Special: September 30 - Agricultural Reform Day in São Tomé and Principe

September 30 - Agricultural Reform Day in São Tomé and Principe

Posted on September 30, 2017

The fact that European countries colonized so much of the world has had so-so-so-so-SO many consequences - mostly problems that continue, in many cases, today.

And, of course, slavery is a Big Evil that often accompanied colonization - and that often made successful colonization possible! - and slavery, needless to say, has had terrible consequences that still echo today.

The two tiny African islands of São Tomé and Principe banded together into one nation, which became independent of Portugal in 1975. At that time, almost all of the agricultural land was tied up in Portuguese-owned plantations (many of them growing cocoa). Back in the bad-old-days, the plantations grew sugar and depended on slave labor. But even with slavery long gone, in 1975, it still seemed pretty unfair that only a few owned so much.

Agricultural reform in the new nation consisted of the government taking control of the plantations. Since the 70s, some of the state-owned land has gone back to being privately owned, but things are more fair, democratic, and stable now than in the teeny nation's past, and more than many African nations.

Here is an export treemap, created to show São Tomé and Principe's reality a few years ago (in 2012). You can see that cocoa production still dominates the nation: