The Agricultural policy of fascism in Italy was a series of complex measures and laws designed and enforced during Italian Fascism, as a move towards attempted autarky, specifically by Benito Mussolini following the Battle for Grain [1] and the 1935 invasion of Abyssinia and subsequent trade embargoes (despite continued trade with Germany).
During the Giolittian Era farmers were gathered into two distinct groups in Italy:
To counter this situation, the government of Francesco Saverio Nitti issued the Visocchi-decree in 1919, followed by the Falcioni-decree in 1920, which allowed the granting of ill-cultivated and uncultivated land to cooperatives formed by war veterans. For the first time, the State gave landless peasants the necessary legal instruments to claim the right to land, despite the ambiguities and red tape.
Upon the return from the First World War, veterans returned to a promise for Latifundium, ill-cultivated land and uncultivated land to be distributed amongst them and cooperatives formed by veterans, under the Visocchi-decree in 1919 and the Falcioni-decree in 1920 under the government of Francesco Saverio Nitti. In this period there were many clashes known as the Red Biennium, in which many Italians rioted and picketed against high prices and inflation, known in Tuscancy as Bocci Bocci. (A linguistic contamination of the word Bolshevism) [4] This led to an expansion of a peasant movement with extensive and comprehensive land occupations due to a socialist hatred of veterans for the outcome of the war, who were often insulted in the street, some of which came under attack such as an Italian military officer Piero Operti who was amongst residents attacked by militant socialists. [5]
During this period two unions were created during the clashes of the Red Biennium period, known as white and red alloys, the protagonists of the clashes. Large landowners sustained a campaign of Sbracciantizzazione, selecting farmers based on personal skills, and was aimed at reducing the number of workers per day (causing a reduction of 44% to 28% of rural workers who were not landowners), failed largely due to the small assignments of land. [6]
A fundamental principle of the Fascist agrarian policy was to apply the principles of partnership, encouraging the different social classes to work together, as opposed to the system of continuous confrontation inherent in the visions of Marxism and Capitalism.
In addition to his ideological leadership, Mussolini pursued a dictatorship of the proletariat, but favouring the peasants. The Duce aimed to create a new social class in Italy by the expropriation of large estates and the transformation of tenants into landowners and settlers. [7] [8]
With the seizure of power by the Fascists, a new agricultural policy was undertaken, based upon concepts of independence and sovereignty of national markets, as well as fascist policies pursued in each sector towards foreign markets. Italy during this period was importing large quantities of grain, equal to one-third of the national demand. [9]
With Fascist aims of autarky, three main methods of intervention were pursued:
The Sbracciantizzazione was a policy pursued by the fascists with the aim of reducing or eliminating the "work day", and reducing the number of workers per day in favor of sharecroppers, tenants, and settlers, to develop small and medium properties, in favor of the development of employment contracts and encouragement of small holdings for the farmers and labourers. [10]
The basic law for land reclamation was the Lex Serpieri n. 3256 of May 8, 1924, [11] aimed at land reclamation work in the Pontine marshes, with the establishment of the Land Reclamation Piscinara and reclamation consortiums (managed and funded by the state) which started channeling the waters of the river basin Astura, reclamation of swamp land, for the management of forestry and pastoral heritage. [12]
In 1926 a royal decree was launched that established two consortia: the existing Piscinara Consortium, which was extended to encompass 48,762 hectares, and the Consortium of Reclamation of the Pontine region, 26,567 hectares, a relatively lower-lying area, sites formed from the territories under sea level and consisted mostly of marshland, thus remediation of reclamation was more complex. Because Mussolini was unable to act alone and did not want to alienate the propertied classes, land reclamation relied heavily on state subsidies.
By the end of the twenties, however, the situation changed and the control of the Consortium by the landowners was overcome thanks to the "Mussolini law" (elaborated by Arrigo Serpieri) of 1928, with which all the land that was unproductive or abandoned was expropriated by about two thirds, allowing for the passage of most reclaimed land to come under direct control of the State, which delegated it to the charity, Opera National Combatants and war Veterans (ONC) together with the management of all projects and land reclamation. [13]
Between 1938 and 1942, the second phase of reclamation was introduced with places of interest being the Puglia and Campania, regions underwent rehabilitation work and continued during World War II, overall over a total of one million hectares of land was reclaimed by the fascist state. [14]
In parallel with the reclamation, fascism carried out the expropriation of large land owners, and owners of thousands of acres of land largely left uncultivated and unproductive, these areas were sown with wheat or left alone to pasture resulting in revenues. The operations of expropriation brought good results in central Italy in Apulia, and less successfully towards Sicily, where the operations of the enormous extent of expropriation of large estates (500,000 hectares), occurred too close to the war to be successfully brought to completion. [12]
The Battle for Grain was instead a campaign (proclaimed on 20 June 1925) of autarky nationalist self-sufficiency in wheat production. It led to the establishment of the Standing Committee of the Grain, and in agreement with Mussolini, decided that the interventions of the state on agricultural production should cater mainly to the increase in the average yield of wheat per hectare, as a modest increase in the average would yield considerable results nationally.
Accordingly, the Standing Committee of the Grain had to face three major problems: Seed selection, fertilizers, and the problems of technical improvements/pricing. With a series of legal measures aimed at modernizing farming techniques (natural and chemical fertilizers, mechanization of agriculture, etc.), the protection of domestic labour from outside competition and the development of state structures (such as itinerant agricultural professorships and agricultural consortia), excellent results were obtained. [15]
In 1931, six years after the first measures of the new national agricultural policy (the launch of the Battle of the Grain), Italy eliminated its trade deficit of 5 billion pounds and almost fully satisfy its need for wheat. It reached a production of 81 million tons, but it was still necessary to import a small quantity of wheat, possibly due to the population increase that occurred over that period.
Records for the year 1931 show the production of wheat per hectare following the agricultural policy reforms. In 1931, Italy produced 16.1 quintals per hectare, which after conversion is 1.77 tons per hectare. By comparison, the United States was producing 8.9 tons of wheat per hectare at that time. [6]
According to a 2020 study, the increase in wheat productivity due to the battle for grain had unintended effects on industrialization and growth, which persisted over the long term. [16]
Fascism is a far-right, authoritarian, ultra-nationalist political ideology and movement, characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the nation and race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy.
The Pontine Marshes is an approximately quadrangular area of former marshland in the Lazio Region of central Italy, extending along the coast southeast of Rome about 45 km (28 mi) from just east of Anzio to Terracina, varying in distance inland between the Tyrrhenian Sea and the Volscian Mountains from 15 to 25 km. The northwestern border runs approximately from the mouth of the river Astura along the river and from its upper reaches to Cori in the Monti Lepini.
The economy of fascist Italy refers to the economy in the Kingdom of Italy between 1922 and 1943, under fascism. Italy had emerged from World War I in a poor and weakened condition and, after the war, suffered inflation, massive debts and an extended depression. By 1920, the economy was in a massive convulsion, with mass unemployment, food shortages, strikes, etc. That conflagration of viewpoints can be exemplified by the so-called Biennio Rosso.
The history of fascist ideology is long and it draws on many sources. Fascists took inspiration from sources as ancient as the Spartans for their focus on racial purity and their emphasis on rule by an elite minority. Fascism has also been connected to the ideals of Plato, though there are key differences between the two. Fascism styled itself as the ideological successor to Rome, particularly the Roman Empire. From the same era, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's view on the absolute authority of the state also strongly influenced fascist thinking. The French Revolution was a major influence insofar as the Nazis saw themselves as fighting back against many of the ideas which it brought to prominence, especially liberalism, liberal democracy and racial equality, whereas on the other hand, fascism drew heavily on the revolutionary ideal of nationalism. The prejudice of a "high and noble" Aryan culture as opposed to a "parasitic" Semitic culture was core to Nazi racial views, while other early forms of fascism concerned themselves with non-racialized conceptions of the nation.
Historians and other scholars disagree on the question of whether a specifically fascist type of economic policy can be said to exist. David Baker argues that there is an identifiable economic system in fascism that is distinct from those advocated by other ideologies, comprising essential characteristics that fascist nations shared. Payne, Paxton, Sternhell et al. argue that while fascist economies share some similarities, there is no distinctive form of fascist economic organization. Gerald Feldman and Timothy Mason argue that fascism is distinguished by an absence of coherent economic ideology and an absence of serious economic thinking. They state that the decisions taken by fascist leaders cannot be explained within a logical economic framework.
The Grand Council of Fascism was the main body of Mussolini's Fascist government in Italy, that held and applied great power to control the institutions of government. It was created as a body of the National Fascist Party in 1922, and became a state body on 9 December 1928. The council usually met at the Palazzo Venezia, Rome, which was also the seat of the head of the Italian government. The Council became extinct following a series of events in 1943, in which Benito Mussolini was voted out of the Prime Ministry of Italy.
Italian fascism, also known as classical fascism or simply fascism, is the original fascist ideology as developed in Italy by Giovanni Gentile and Benito Mussolini. The ideology is associated with a series of two political parties led by Benito Mussolini: the National Fascist Party (PNF), which ruled the Kingdom of Italy from 1922 until 1943, and the Republican Fascist Party (PFR) that ruled the Italian Social Republic from 1943 to 1945. Italian fascism is also associated with the post-war Italian Social Movement (MSI) and subsequent Italian neo-fascist movements.
The Kingdom of Italy was a state that existed from 1861, when Victor Emmanuel II of Sardinia was proclaimed King of Italy, until 1946, when civil discontent led to an institutional referendum to abandon the monarchy and form the modern Italian Republic. The state resulted from a decades-long process, the Risorgimento, of consolidating the different states of the Italian Peninsula into a single state. That process was influenced by the Savoy-led Kingdom of Sardinia, which can be considered Italy's legal predecessor state.
The Congress of Verona in November 1943 was the only congress of the Italian Republican Fascist Party, the successor of the National Fascist Party. At the time, the Republican Fascist Party was nominally in charge of the Italian Social Republic, also called the Salò Republic, which was a fascist state set up in Northern Italy after the Italian government signed an armistice with the Allies and fled to Southern Italy. The Salò Republic was in fact a German puppet state and most of its internal and external policies were dictated by German military commanders. Nevertheless, Italian fascists were allowed to keep the trappings of sovereignty. It was under these conditions that they organized the Congress of Verona, ostensibly for the purpose of charting a new political course and rejuvenating the Italian fascist movement. The attitude of the Italian Fascists towards Italian Jews also drastically changed after the Congress of Verona, when Fascist authorities declared them to be of "enemy nationality" and begun to actively participate in the prosecution and arrest of Jews.
Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini was an Italian politician and journalist who founded and led the National Fascist Party. He was Prime Minister of Italy from the March on Rome in 1922 until his deposition in 1943, and "Duce" of Italian Fascism from the establishment of the Italian Fasces of Combat in 1919 until his execution in 1945 by Italian partisans. As dictator of Italy and principal founder of fascism, Mussolini inspired and supported the international spread of fascist movements during the inter-war period.
The Battle for Grain, also known as the Battle for Wheat, was a propaganda campaign launched in 1925 during the fascist regime of Italy by Benito Mussolini, with the aim of gaining self-sufficiency in wheat production and freeing Italy from the "slavery of foreign bread". This campaign was successful in increasing wheat output and lowering the trade balance deficit, but was ultimately economically counter-productive for Italy's agricultural sector as farmers who grew other produce had to clear their land for grain cultivation which decreased exports and thus resulted in higher food prices which placed Italian families under financial strain.
The Battle for the Lira was an economic policy undertaken by the Fascists in Italy during the 1920s as an attempt to raise the claims of Italy becoming a great power.
The Battle For Land, started in 1928 in Italy by Benito Mussolini, aimed to clear marshland and make it suitable for farming, as well as reclaiming land and reducing health risks.
The Battle for Births was one of four economic battles that took place in Fascist Italy (1922–1943), the others being the Battle for Grain, the Battle for the Lira, and the Battle for Land. Prime Minister Benito Mussolini, often known as Il Duce, envisioned an Italian Empire to rival that of the Romans, and in order to carry out this objective, foresaw the need to increase the population. Mussolini pursued an often aggressive foreign policy to achieve his colonial aims: the Italian army invaded Abyssinia in October 1935. The phrase "Battle for Births" was also used, in contemporary sources, to describe policies developed in Nazi Germany.
Despite the crisis in Syria, agriculture remains a key part of the economy. The sector still accounts for an estimated 26 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) and represents a critical safety net for the 6.7 million Syrians – including those internally displaced - who still remain in rural areas. However, agriculture and the livelihoods that depend on it have suffered massive losses . Today, food production is at a record low and around half the population remaining in Syria are unable to meet their daily food needs.
Nicola Alongi, was a Sicilian socialist leader, involved in the Fasci Siciliani a popular movement of democratic and socialist inspiration in 1891–1894. He was killed by the Mafia.
Sbracciantizzazione was a policy pursued by fascism, specifically in Italy during the Battle for Grain.
Arrigo Serpieri was an economist, politician, and agronomist. Serpieri was an expert in agricultural economics, and was undersecretary of the Ministry of Agriculture during the Fascist period.
Agrarian reform and land reform have been a recurring theme of enormous consequence in world history. They are often highly political and have been achieved in many countries.
The Kingdom of Italy was governed by the National Fascist Party from 1922 to 1943 with Benito Mussolini as prime minister. The Italian Fascists imposed authoritarian rule and crushed political and intellectual opposition, while promoting economic modernization, traditional social values and a rapprochement with the Roman Catholic Church.