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In spite of the consensus around the importance of the Battle of Wheat for the regime’s imagery, the general historiographical verdict about its effects tends to assume a negative tone.[9] The campaign is perceived as the price paid by the National Fascist Party to guarantee support from backward southern landowners who would not survive without generous state subsidies in the form of high duties on foreign cereals.[10] Historians have also identified the modern capitalist landowners of the northern fertile areas of the Po Valley as major beneficiaries of the regime of wheat autarky, making big profits on the backs of underpaid wage laborers. Although the regime promised to defend small landowners and sharecroppers as the backbone of the national community, this middle stratum of Italian peasantry migrated in increasing numbers to urban centers during the fascist years. The campaign was also funded by consumers paying higher prices for bread, for Italian wheat was always more expensive than North American or Argentinean grain sold in international markets. This negatively affected not only the domestic budget of city dwellers, particularly industrial workers, but also that of small farmers inhabiting Italian mountain regions where meager grain production, insufficient for local consumption, required them to buy their bread at climbing prices. The Battle of Wheat is also held responsible for an excessive obsession with wheat production that undermined the previous diversity of Italian agriculture, penalizing fruit, vegetable, and wine production and contributing to accelerate soil erosion through the cultivation of poor thin soils. Ten years after the launching of the Battle of Wheat, Italy produced 40 percent more wheat but had increased its food deficit in other items, especially meat. To summarize, the “mission accomplished” banner heralded by Mussolini in 1933, when productivity rose above 15 quintals per hectare, is seen as another act of propaganda by a regime exaggerating its feats while hiding the many problems caused by its policies.

Figure 1.1 Armando Bruni, “Mussolini threshing wheat at the Agro Pontino” (1935).(Fondo Armando Bruni / Rcs Archive)

My intention here is not to dispute this historiographical consensus over the many failures of the Battle of Wheat. I am interested, instead, in emphasizing how the campaign constituted one of the first materializations of the fascist regime, with scientists, especially geneticists, playing a major role in the process of building the New State. We can get a first hint of this interaction between science and politics just by looking at the constitution of the Permanent Wheat Committee founded in 1925 to command the battle.[11] The Duce himself headed the new organism formed from a mix of high-ranking state officials (Minister of the National Economy Giuseppe Belluzo, General Director of the Agricultural Services Alessandro Brizi), renowned agricultural scientists (Mario Ferraguti, Tito Poggi, Enrico Fileni, Novello Novelli, Emanuele De Cillis, Nazareno Strampelli), and representatives of farmers syndicates (Antonino Battoli, vice-president of FISA), to be joined later by leaders of fascist peasant unions (Luigi Razza).[12] The meetings of the committee thus were a combination of charismatic leadership, state apparatus, corporatist organizations, and science.[13]

Figure 1.2 The Permanent Committee of the Wheat Campaign, 1925. Nazareno Strampelli is seated immediately to the right of Mussolini.(Il Giornale di Risicoltura 15, no. 8 (1925): 116)
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Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism
Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism

In the fascist regimes of Mussolini's Italy, Salazar's Portugal, and Hitler's Germany, the first mass mobilizations involved wheat engineered to take advantage of chemical fertilizers, potatoes resistant to late blight, and pigs that thrived on national produce. Food independence was an early goal of fascism; indeed, as Tiago Saraiva writes in Fascist Pigs, fascists were obsessed with projects to feed the national body from the national soil. Saraiva shows how such technoscientific organisms as specially bred wheat and pigs became important elements in the institutionalization and expansion of fascist regimes. The pigs, the potatoes, and the wheat embodied fascism. In Nazi Germany, only plants and animals conforming to the new national standards would be allowed to reproduce. Pigs that didn't efficiently convert German-grown potatoes into pork and lard were eliminated.Saraiva describes national campaigns that intertwined the work of geneticists with new state bureaucracies; discusses fascist empires, considering forced labor on coffee, rubber, and cotton in Ethiopia, Mozambique, and Eastern Europe; and explores fascist genocides, following Karakul sheep from a laboratory in Germany to Eastern Europe, Libya, Ethiopia, and Angola.Saraiva's highly original account — the first systematic study of the relation between science and fascism — argues that the "back to the land" aspect of fascism should be understood as a modernist experiment involving geneticists and their organisms, mass propaganda, overgrown bureaucracy, and violent colonialism.Inside Technologyedited by Wiebe E. Bijker, W. Bernard Carlson, and Trevor J. PinchA list of the series appears at the back of the book.

Tiago Saraiva

История

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