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12. Battle for Land

Battle for Land:

Land Reclamation:

  1. Fascism’s second major initiative was land reclamation and improvement.
  2. Previous governments had already started, providing money to drain or irrigate farmland. Mussolini simply expanded these schemes.
  3. The Pontine marshes, only 50 km from Rome and easily accessible by foreign journalists, were the showpiece. These material swamps were drained and a small network of farms were set up, owned by ex-servicemen.
  4. Overall land reclamation was a success since it improved health and provided thousands of jobs during the depression. But, the amount of land reclaimed was very limited.

Impact of Agricultural Policy on Living Standards:

  1. Agricultural workers suffered even heavier wage cuts than industrial workers during the 1930s.
  2. In the past, the way out of this poverty had been emigration. In the first two decades of the 1900s, around 200,000 Italians emigrated to the USA each year. However, in 1920, the USA decided to virtually stop all further immigration.
  3. With this door on rural poverty closed, more Italians left the countryside for towns and cities to find work and a better standard of living. Up to half a million left the countryside in the 1920s and 1930s, while between 1921 and 1941 the population of Rome doubled. This was despite the fact that Mussolini tried to prevent all further migration.
  4. Mussolini’s resistance to migration to the cities was because of his proclaimed love for the countryside and desire to ruralise Italy. He wanted to create a vigorous class of prosperous peasants devoted to Fascism.
  5. But his policies brought more benefit to wealthy landowners than poor, landless peasants. Peasants needed land to support their families. A law had been introduced into parliament in 1922 to break up big estates and distribute them amongst the peasantry. But, Mussolini quietly dropped this for fear of offending the great landowners - his political supporters.
  6. Failure to break up great land estates cemented the economic underdevelopment and poverty of the south. The gap between an industrialising north and rural south had grown wider under the liberals, but continued to do so under the Fascists.
  7. Mussolini only visited the poverty-stricken island of Sicily once after 1924. This indicates a recognition of his own regime’s failure in the south. Italy lay 18th in a European table for daily calorie intake of its people, with the lowest Italian figures being recorded in the south. This provides statistical proof of Fasicsm’s failure to tackle rural poverty.