Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism

This characterization of the effects of the Battle of Wheat should not = be taken as praise for the initiative. In fact, as Italian historians have insisted, the first beneficiaries of the new strains were the large landowners of the fertile Po Valley, confirming the popular saying “elite races for elite farmers.”[61] Protected from external competition by high customs duties and having access to easy credit and to a cheap labor pool kept under terror by the paramilitary Blackshirts, they greatly increased their incomes by selling the high-yield Ardito at high prices. In contrast, the spread of Strampelli’s varieties among small landowners, especially among sharecroppers whom the regime had promised to defend, didn’t stop their debts from rising during the fascist years. Difficult access to credit and the larger investments demanded by the new strains only contributed to increasing the number of rural people that migrated to urban centers against the explicit aims of the regime. The hardening of the genetic identity of the new wheat strains also exacerbated social inequalities.[62]

The following testimony is from Emanuele De Cillis, one of the agriculture experts who made up the Permanent Wheat Committee, concerning the introduction of new varieties into the underdeveloped Mezzogiorno in southern Italy:

The local soft wheats are impure races, formed by several genotypes, mixed in balanced proportions in function of the different environments:… they are thus more rustic, less demanding, more resistant to meteorological variations. They have much more balanced productions, but always modest ones…. The elite races are much more productive but also much more demanding. They are more susceptible to adverse weather conditions and this lower resistance can only be corrected through improved cultivation methods…. To promote the introduction of new early soft wheat in places one can not cultivate using the processes modern technique prescribes is absurd.[63]

The network of experiment stations and fields put in place by Strampelli determined for each location the proper amount and quality of fertilizers, rotation cycles, sowing distance, soil preparation, and all the other agricultural factors that one had to control for to express the high-yield properties of his new strains. In other words, in order for Ardito to circulate from the geneticist’s experimental plot to the farmers’ fields, the fields had to be converted into spaces reproducing the laboratory conditions of the experiment station. In spite of all the propaganda effort that went into the Battle of Wheat, the fascist state did not guarantee each and every farmer, small landholder, or sharecropper the tools for cultivating the land using the procedures deemed adequate for each new technoscientific organism.

If the fascist regime was not able to keep up to its promises, this doesn’t mean that Ardito was not effective. The astonishing numbers of its presence (along with other new strains) throughout the whole Italian territory and the wiping out of traditional landraces confirm the major effects of the initiative. The high-yield wheats increased rural debt among sharecroppers and small landholders, which indicates that Italians who were previously limited to a local economy were now participating in a national one, even when this didn’t bring them any major monetary return. Millions of farmers and peasants were now sustaining major chemical conglomerates, one of the main industrial investments of the fascist government. There is no doubt the battle was fought on the backs of overexploited and repressed wage laborers as well as of sharecroppers, but the fascists had been able to tighten national interdependences, with the growth of new industrial undertakings based on the produce of the national soil. Strampelli’s new organisms had in fact been able to weave new ties between Italians, contributing to the strengthening of the national community envisioned by fascists, even when large numbers of its members were poorer than before. The lodging-resistant Ardito delivered on the fascists’ promise of stronger nationalism but not on the promise of egalitarianism.

Human and Non-Human Arditi