Agriculture

Here is what A. W., age 9 (…), writes: ‘I’d like to be a cow and give milk, because I’d feel like valuable property at home.’ Is she alone? Probably many children would feel better if they were property. Parents would take better care of them, and more keenly feel their loss.¹
Wilhelm Kalita,
Dziecko pokuckie, 1934

In the interwar period, the population of Europe remained closely tied to farming. Only in the most highly developed regions of the continent did industry gain the upper hand. In 2015, around 4.5 per cent of the European Union’s professionally active inhabitants were employed in agriculture, though we should point out that this level mainly results from the inclusion of the less affluent countries (Poland: eleven per cent, Bulgaria: eighteen per cent). Germany, Sweden, and Great Britain have less than a 1.5 per cent share of agricultural workers.²

By way of comparison, in 1925 twenty-five per cent of the Reich’s inhabitants worked in farming.³ In absolute numbers, this means that in this admittedly large country there were only slightly fewer people employed in farming and livestock then there are farmers at present in the whole of the EU.⁴ In the poorer countries, the statistics are even more striking: 45.5 per cent worked in farming in Spain (in 1930)⁵ and 61 per cent in Poland (in 1931).⁶

Alt text — Peasants at the market.
photo: NAC 3/1/0/8/6054/1

We should stress that even these numbers were the result of an economic revolution that had been continuing for decades—just before World War One, a significant portion of the population had moved to the cities, finding employment in industry, and the economic prosperity of the 1920s only accelerated this process. By the same token, agriculture’s share of the GDP dropped significantly—in 1930 in Spain, it was a mere sixteen per cent.⁷

Technological advances, such as progress in transportation or new chemical discoveries to produce artificial fertilizers, led to a drop in food prices from the late nineteenth century onward.⁸ While this was positive for society as a whole—even the poorest urban dwellers could afford larger and more diverse meals—the peasants were not necessarily in agreement.

They prospered in the period after World War One—food was always a necessity, and so inflation was a much smaller problem for agriculture than it was for industry (and decreasing currency value meant they could shed potential debts). Yet the Great Depression came as a true shock. In Poland, “while in 1928, farmers received 100 per cent of prices, in 1934–36 this gradually fell to 34-35 per cent.”⁹ This could only result in major ethnic and class tensions, and on a private level, in malnutrition and suffering.