Mendes Bota chooses his fights carefully. The current line of enquiry for the PSD MP for Faro has resulted in questions to the government over a large land dispute in the municipality of Loulé.
Bota has looked at the facts surrounding the dispute over the possession of land in the parishes of Querença and Salir where dozens of people are claiming to own land that a Finnish development company claims as its own and where it has started to develop commercial olive groves in a move that the company claims is in accord with all current legislation.
In 2004 the company registered in the Loulé Land Registry five rustic buildings with 110,5121 hectares of associated land.
According to a document from the regional directorate of Agriculture and Fisheries of the Algarve, it was informed that the total area of the land entered in the registry by the company was 274,4359 hectares.
This substantial difference seems partly due to two buildings having associated land areas of 1,256.663 m2 and 383.341 m2 as per the description in the Conservatória do Registo Predial, while the description on the rustic cadernetas show areas of 125,6663 hectares and 38,3341 hectares, i.e. a comma in both figures has been incorrectly transposed at some point.
"Here we see how a little comma can make a big difference, indicating that it may have been a clerical error, and for as long as this inaccuracy is not corrected, the area described in the Conservatória do Registo Predial prevails," says Mendes Bota, meaning that the company owns a fraction of the area it thought it was buying.
The design of the intensive olive grove, applied for under the PRODER system, has already begun with the cleaning of land, removal of rocks and the marking out of land which led to problems as local landowners have disputed the right of the company to work on land they claimed was not even owned by the company.
Mendes Bota said that that entries in the land registry are based "merely" on the statements of the parties concerned, which, he claims, often leads to differences between what is stated in the official papers and the physical reality in terms of areas and boundaries.
In the application submitted to the Ministry of Agriculture, Mendes Bota has put a set of 12 questions relating to the conflict.
The MP asks, among other things, what was submitted to PRODER, which entities have spoken favorably that the company owns more than does on paper, and what area has been occupied by the olive groves, how the land was identified i.e. which maps were used, as well as asking for any historical aspects of the land in question?
Recalling earlier criticism from ecology group ALMARGEM about a lack of respect for the environment by the company when it started to clear the land for its agricultural project, and was stopped from bulldozing the countryside by the authorities after complaints, Mendes Bota wants to know which areas under development are National Ecological Reserve, which are covered by the Natura classification, and whether an environmental impact study was ever prepared and submitted.
