The ‘Battle for Wheat’ was a campaign that the Fascists started in 1925 to increase Italy’s wheat production, and to an extent, as I’ll show here, it succeeded. This sounds really exciting and surprisingly generous given its approvers, but in actuality it was just a way for Fascist Italy to reduce its reliance on food imports, and by extension, the powers supplying them. (Proof is in the Italian lower classes’ inadequate nutrition.)

What was the Fascists’ secret weapon in their quest for autarchy? An agronomist by the name of Nazareno Strampelli, who

had found earlier that short stems were more resistant to lodging. He made several crossings with Akakomugi, but the key one in 1913 was with a wheat variety that derived from Rieti and another variety, Wilhelmina Tarwe, which in turn derived from Dutch, British and New Zealand varieties.

He and his associates made many more crosses with these Japanese varieties over the following decade. One of the resulting lines that he selected in 1916 matured 2–3, weeks early, was 80–100 cm tall, or half the height of the usual wheat varieties, was resistant to rust and cold and very high yielding. Strampelli released this variety after extensive testing in 1920, under the name Ardito.

Strampelli’s contributions to Italian agriculture and agronomy in general are undeniable. Although he was technically a Fascist,

he joined the fascist party in 1925 not out of conviction but to protect himself from being victimized for his membership in the Freemasons, whom the fascists had outlawed that year.

Mussolini made him a Senator, but he almost never attended the legislature’s meetings, and one of the times he did, in December 1938 for the approval of Racial Laws against Jews, he was apparently one of the six senators out of 170 who abstained from voting. He apparently never signed this document, the ‘Manifesto della Razza’, and his granddaughter also remembered that he wanted his children ‘to have an open mind to all cultures’.

The ‘Battle for Wheat’ may well have been Strampelli’s idea. Its programmes

proceeded slowly but steadily, but in the process, Italy went through a series of agrarian and food crises before the country approached self‐sufficiency in the 1930s.

Overall wheat output varied yearly; some years the weather was favourable and the harvests were good, but other years they were the opposite. They just went up and down and up and down and up and down. Nevertheless, the gradual adoption of Strampelli’s wheat mitigated the worst consequences:

The press reports indicated that the heavy rains struck in July, which meant that the rust would have peaked in that month or after. Strampelli’s varieties would already have been mature or nearly mature by that time.

These considerations strongly suggest that Strampelli’s varieties greatly protected Italy’s wheat crop from the European rust infestation that reached Italy in summer 1932 and made possible that year’s record‐breaking harvest.

[…]

The result in 1933 was yet another record breaking harvest of 8.1 million tons, the largest in the country’s history and sufficient for its annual consumption needs, with an average yield of 15 quintals per hectare.

The increase was achieved, according to a report from Italy, by ‘better technique in cultivation, improved preparation of soil, adaptation of cautious rotations and the sowing of selected types, especially early types’ and only minimally by the small increase in sown area.

The U.S. Department of Commerce Trade Commissioner in Rome, Elizabeth Humes, confirmed these results and explanations. This harvest success was thus the result of both good weather, use of Strampelli’s seeds, and the programmes of the Battle for Wheat.

By November 1933, Mussolini used the success of the Battle for Grain to announce campaigns to achieve similar increases in production in fruit, cattle and other products.

To illustrate the fluctuation, here’s one of the worse periods:

The smaller harvest of 1936, in Italy and elsewhere in Europe, required Italy to compete with other countries for wheat imports[.] The government also faced increasing domestic demand, price increases and popular protests about prices. In October 1935, the government formed a permanent committee for price control, which began setting maximum retail prices and punishing violators.

To ensure that farmers would produce more crops despite price controls, in March 1936, the government ‘commandeered’ all of Italy’s wheat, required farmers to deliver their crops to state warehouses, eliminating middlemen, and required millers to mill grain only from the state warehouses. Farmers were obligated to deliver to government grain elevators 95% of their produce and could keep the rest for family needs.

This was part of a larger series of measures to impose controls over most of the economy. As Nützenadel describes it, this programme was a failure: Price fixing poorly accommodated regional differences and led to ‘chaos’ and ‘an explosion of protests’, while farmers saw the obligatory deliveries as ‘Marxist expropriations’ and delivered only 43% of their produce, more in the north but 16% or less in the south. Shortages appeared, flour mills stopped running and a black market developed.

While an antisocialist dullard will inevitably see this as the smoking gun that Fascist Italy, like almost everything else in existence, was ‘socialist’, careful readers will note the date: October 1935. This was the same time that the Fascists invaded Ethiopia, and the market’s inefficiency at distributing resources inevitably forces the state to intervene during serious situations like war.

Now here’s a rebound:

What rescued Italy from this crisis were substantial reductions in import tariffs on food, large food imports in the first half of 1937 and successful harvests of most crops that year. Not only did the farmers produce over 30% more wheat, they also increased maize, oats, and barley production, and olive oil from 44.5 to 66 million gallons.

Apparently to avert this kind of crisis in the future, the government decided to create wheat reserves by storing some of the large harvest, and requiring that flour for bread includes 10% maize.

As you may have guessed, 1939 was a different story. To sum up the 1930s overall:

It appears that in over half the years from 1930 to 1940, Italy produced all or most of the wheat it needed, and even the lower harvests were larger than in the past. Italy still imported wheat, but much less, and apparently much of this wheat was re‐exported; for example, in 1933, Italy imported 465,506 tons, and re‐exported 388,813 tons of that.

If the 1930s come across as a mixed bag, the 1940s present an image that’s more straightforward:

Italy entered the war in June 1940 with 750,000 tons of wheat, less than 10% of annual needs, and smaller reserves of other foods[.] Italy’s food supply and distribution experience in World War II were worse than in World War I, because [the Third Reich] demanded that Italy export food and labour to Germany.

The Italian government imposed rationing in 1940, extending it to wheat and other necessities by fall 1941, and rations declined to below subsistence levels. Many people in cities and rural areas resisted government restrictions and [the Third Reich’s] demands, created black markets, hoarded food and sabotaged government actions.

During this wartime food supply crisis, on 23 January 1942, Strampelli died, and in 1943, Italian Fascism finally was overthrown (except for the short‐lived Italian Social Republic).

Finally, as further proof that the ‘Battle for Wheat’ was not a charity:

[D]espite some of its stated intentions the Battle for Wheat did not undermine the income or power of the south Italian landlords.

[…]

Strampelli’s Green Revolution was partial […] because it spread relatively slowly, depending on the voluntary actions of farmers, with the larger and more commercial ones acting first, and the more numerous poorer farmers often unable to afford to adopt the HYVs, a pattern also found in Mexico and South Asia.

Italy also had numerous environmental crises, including both weather and plant diseases. Even though his varieties usually endured those natural tests well, these crises probably hindered some farmers from adopting them because of the costs that these disasters caused.

[…]

These leaders introduced some important reforms, but they wanted agriculture to be more modern and productive so that their countries could spend less on food and more on industrial development.

Mussolini also propagandized the goals of self‐sufficiency and ruralization to benefit the common people, but only initiated a major land reform in late 1939, too late to see it implemented.

Once Italy seemed to be moving towards Mussolini’s rural goals, in the late 1930s, [the Fascist bourgeoisie] shifted towards [more] imperialism, and then all of his projects were disrupted by the demands of World War II.

(Emphasis added in all cases.)