Land and capital accumulation in Greek agriculture by region (1950-2010)

Abstract

After the liberation (1828) the land that belonged to the Turks became state-owned land. A large part of the state’s revenue was covered by the rent. The distribution of national domain, as it was called; in the year 1871 solved the problem that arose by the farmer’s discomfort against the state-landlord. A new important issue arose by the adaptation of Thessaly (1881), where the Turks when they were leaving, sold their land, often for very low price, to Greek capitalists. Thus, the manors appeared. This issue took tremendous dimensions at the beginning of the 20th century with the villagers’ riots at this region. After the Balkan Wars (1912, 1913) and World War I the annexation of Macedonia, Epirus and Thrace, where domains prevailed, inflated the problem. The entrance of the refugees after the Asia Minor disaster (1922) led the governments to extended land consolidation. In order to multiply the farming lands, at the decade of 1930, large productive works were carried out in northern Greece (drainage of lakes, ponds etc.). After World War II the program of landimprovement works was accelerated and as a result the number of irrigated lands was significantly increased and the cultivated land differed, while the plantations expanded very quickly. During 1950 to 80 through subsidy loans by the public Agriculture Bank, a modernization of agriculture was attempted (mechanization, improved seeds, pesticides etc) and restructuring of farming was partially achieved. The aim of this paper hereof is double: Firstly, it seeks to investigate, something which does not exist in Greek bibliography, what was the value of the land, in relevance to the capital accumulation, not only in the whole country, but also per prefecture and secondly, which was the contribution of the land improvement at the growth of the product. The data arose from long-term investigation of authors over the subject of framing the agriculture economy sizes and the method was based on the archives consultation.