Women's Work and Lives in Rural Greece

Appearances and Realities

Gabriella Lazaridis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781134781430
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

This new volume explores the limits and possibilities of economic change in transforming the lives of women in rural Greece at a time of great economic and political change. It is based on ethnographic research conducted in two communities of Western Crete: Nohia and Platanos, where Lazaridis concentrates on three activities women are involved in: handcrafts, market-gardening and olive-growing.

Chapter 1

The Geographical and Historico-Politico-Economic Contexts

Crete¹

The island of Crete stands at the extreme southern portion of Greek territory and is dominated by harsh mountains. It has an area of 8,261 km² and its population is around half a million people. ‘It regards itself as an idiosyncratic and proudly independent part of the national entity, distinct from it, physically separated from it, but yet endowed with qualities that have made Crete the birthplace of many national leaders in politics, war, and the arts’ (Herzfeld 1985: 6). Today Crete is one of Greece’s leading regions in the production of olives, olive oil, grapes, citrus fruits and vegetables, all exported mostly to the mainland. Due to the morphology of the soil, mechanized agriculture is limited to the Messara Plain, which is Crete’s major expanse of flatland and extends along the south-central part of the island for about 18 miles. Most of the arable land is worked in small holdings by independent proprietors. The administrative region of Crete is divided into four departments (prefectures or nomoi): Chania, Rethymnon, Heracleon and Lasithi.

Agriculture in Greece and in Crete until the late 1980s: The Persistence of Small Farming

The brief historical account presented here mainly concentrates on the period following Crete’s unification with Greece (1913)² and identifies some of the factors which have influenced social and economic changes in the area. It addresses the persistence of small-scale farming, analyses the role of the European Community policies during the first decade of Greece’s accession (Greece became a full member-state of the EC in 1981), since their implementation has had (and still has) a major impact on the working lives of rural women and men.

At the turn of the twentieth century many peasants in Greece and in Crete were landless, whereas a few owned large areas of land.³ This led to peasant unrest over redistribution of land, and the bloodshed which took place in Kileler (Thessaly) in March 1910 (Kordatos 1973:281). According to Kordatos (ibid.:283), the need for recruiting peasants for the armed forces in the First World War, together with the pressure put on the government by peasant unrest, made the government enact laws in favour of the peasantry. Hence, in 1917 reforms⁴ meant the redistribution of land to landless families, which, however, did not come into full implementation until the influx of 1,500,000 refugees⁵ from Asia Minor in 1922.

However, although small land ownership was thus encouraged or, as in Crete, reinforced, in the long run the agrotes⁶ were squeezed by impersonal financial institutions (banks) as opposed to private land owners of the past (Vergopoulos 1975: 180). During the early part of the twentieth century, more than 83 per cent of producers in Greece were in debt (ibid.:185). It was during the Metaxas dictatorship (1936–1941) that a series of measures was introduced (law 677 of 1937) under which the interest owed by the agrotes was cancelled, the interest rate for new loans was reduced by 3 per cent and they were given an extended period to pay back their loans. Portions of loans which amounted to more than 60 per cent of the producer’s property were written off.

State intervention continued to operate through the so-called ‘safety prices’ (times asfalias),⁷ on agricultural products such as cereals, cotton and olive oil. Gradually the state took responsibility for marketing some agricultural products. Between 1922 and 1936 a series of public institutions was introduced; each channelled a specific product to other markets. In other words, one institution dealt with cotton, another with olive oil. The world crisis in 1929–1932 meant the decrease of exports (currants, olive oil, tobacco). A number of producers turned to the production of such products as cotton, fodder, cereals and legumes for internal consumption. This, in fact, fuelled industrial development.⁸

Finally, peasants were more heavily taxed than the urban population, thus allowing for transfer of resources from agriculture in favour of industrialization. In this way, agriculture served the needs of capitalist development in Greece.

Small family-based production persisted further. One of the strongest theoretical arguments for this position is provided by Vergopoulos (1975), who argues against the Marxist position. The Marxist position entails two related ‘theses’: first, that with the growth of the capitalist mode of production and the increasing commoditization in agrarian societies, agriculture will follow the same path of development as industry; second, that there will be polarization of the agrarian class-structure with an increasing concentration and centralization of production into large-scale units, which, in turn, will mean the ‘depeasantizing’ (elimination or proletarianization) and squeezing out of small family producers by the development of capitalist farming. Small family farming continued to exist, because, as Vergopoulos argues, is served the interests of urban industrial capitalism. This argument is based on a theory developed by Samir Amin, according to which the development of agriculture must be understood in terms of an articulation between capitalist and simple commodity production, which ensures the transfer of resources from the latter to the former (Mouzelis 1979: 75,80). The reasons for this state of affairs are threefold: first, the amount of land available for cultivation is limited and cannot be reproduced at will as other commodities can; second, ‘whereas in all other branches of production additional investments succeed in bringing down total costs per unit, it is only in primary production that capital investment comes up against the barrier of constant or increasing costs in relation to the invested capital’ (Amin and Vergopoulos 1974: 263, translated from French by Mouzelis 1976); thirdly, small producers are constantly forced to modernize and suffer exploitation by private capital through the market mechanism – for example by paying high prices for industrial products used in agriculture while at the same time selling agricultural products at low prices – in order to increase productivity to cover expenses and pay debts. To quote Vergopoulos (1978: 446–7):

The peasant who is working for himself does not necessarily consider himself to be a capitalist, or an entrepreneur, whose activities depend on the ability to obtain a positive rate of profit. On the contrary, although the head of his agricultural concern, he sees himself, more often than not, as a plain worker, who is entitled to a remuneration which will simply assure him his livelihood. Moreover, in the framework of domestic economy, the problem of ground rent does not arise … Family farming thus provides contemporary society with agricultural products at their ‘cost price’ (which includes the strictly necessary remuneration of labour), as well as putting the totality of his own surplus labour, which would normally correspond to profit and ground rent, at the disposal of the urban economy.

On the basis of the 1929, 1950, 1961 and 1971 agricultural censuses of Greece, Vergopoulos (1975: 211–16) revealed that the amount of farming based on family labour actually increased from 79 per cent in 1929, to 86 per cent in 1961, to 88 per cent in 1971. A survey carried out in the early 1950s revealed that 96 per cent of farmers in Crete owned all or part of their land. The remaining 4 per cent were farming: (a) lands assigned to them by the Greek government in the 1922–1923 population exchange with Turkey; (b) lands transferred by parents but not yet formally deeded; and (c) a tract owned by the occupant’s relative and farmed rent free. Three-quarters of agrotes owned all the land which they cultivated, with an additional 20 per cent owning some and renting the remainder of the land which they cultivated. Ninety per cent of renting was on a share-cropping basis (Allbaugh 1953: 250). According to Burgel (1965), this is also true for Pobia, in southwestern Crete, where no property being cultivated entirely by wage labourers was found; he writes: ‘tenant farming is a phenomenon entirely unknown in Pobia’ (Burgel 1965: 61 – my translation). As Niotakis (1958: 57–8) argues, small units of production based on family labour prevail all over Greece; he calls this type of land ownership ‘dwarfish ownership’. According to him, in the late 1950s, 67.4 per cent of agricultural units of production in Crete occupied an area less than 29 stremmata and these units were divided into parcels, sometimes lying far from one another. Settas (1963: 83) reveals that in the early 1960s, a family’s land in Crete could be divided into six to 12 parcels (average 8.9). This tendency towards parcelization rather than concentration of the land is a characteristic of Greek agriculture.

During the rural exoduses of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, those who migrated preferred to keep their attachment to their land by letting it through verbal arrangements rather than selling it. The rent remained low. Vergopoulos does not seem to share the opinion held either by writers like Moysides (1986: 106, 120) who believes that rent acts as a medium for concentration of land, or with politicians like Kanelopoulos and Heleou (Vergopoulos 1965), who believed that migration is closely related to industrialization in that the transfer of surplus population from the agricultural sector to the industrial one, would lead to a rise in population in urban centres which would affect urban wages and at the same time lead to a rise in agricultural productivity and hence reduce the social cost of agriculture. Vergopoulos believes that migration of one or more family members is a key source of supplementary income, perhaps the only one available, which in fact allows for the reproduction of the family unit. As Burgel (1965: 22) writes (with reference to the village in eastern Crete he researched), in the 1960s local industries could no longer supplement farm income.

Moreover, according to Vergopoulos, private entrepreneurs avoid investing in agriculture since investments in other industries are more profitable. As a result, more than 40 per cent of the total investment in agriculture in the period 1954–1970, was undertaken by the state (OECD 1973: 22). Credit was (and still is) provided to the agrotes by the Agricultural Bank of Greece (ATE). As in the period after 1917, debts arise not due to bad management but because the agrotes are encouraged to borrow money in order to carry on. In 1962, almost all farmers had debts with ATE (Vergopoulos 1975: 229–34). One reason for the debts becoming huge was the high interest rate imposed by the bank. The state was obliged, as in the 1930s, to write off the debts. In 1964, for example, the George Papandreou government announced a partial reduction of the debt and in 1967 the Papadopoulos dictatorship wrote off the debt, which amounted to 7 billion drachmas. This state intervention secured the long-term existence of small family-based production in the primary sector.

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, the government’s economic policy encouraged industrialization by keeping agricultural prices and prices of raw materials used in industrial production low, while at the same time allowing industrial prices to increase. Hence, agrotes had to work more and more to be able to afford industrial products and at the same time ensure the reproduction of the household. This implies a transfer of revenues via the market from the agricultural to the industrial sector; the squeezing of agricultural labour is not a product of the relation between rich and poor agrotes, but of producers’ relations with the urban sector via the market (Vergopoulos 1975: 224, 263).

One of the factors which had in the past helped some agrotes to continue to exist was migration and in particular remittances. Although by the 1980s emigration from the Greek countryside had almost ceased to exist,⁹ new mechanisms had developed which helped Greek and other southern European farmers – especially medium-size ones – to persist. These were European Community (EC) subsidies and adoption of a new type of cultivation geared towards new markets along with an expanding informal sector.¹⁰ How recent EU agricultural policies regarding cuts in agricultural subsidies affect Greek and Cretan farmers remains to be seen.

Before proceeding into the next section it must be noted that although Vergopoulos’ work is widely respected and regarded as one of the most significant attempts to analyse the relationship between capitalist development and agriculture in Greece in a historical and theoretical manner, it has nevertheless received some strong criticism. Moysides (1986: 120) for example, argues that since the 1950s, there has been a shift from small to large agricultural farms, especially in flat (level) areas of Thessaly, Macedonia and Thrace, where arable cultivation for cash prevails. According to him a significant role in this concentration of land is played by what he calls ‘indirect type of concentration’, that is concentration of land via letting it. Nevertheless, in areas such as Crete, the Ionian islands, and Peloponnesos, there is a decrease in the available land for rent. This is attributed by Moysides (1986: 116–17) to the crisis of arable cultivation which did not permit small producers (who, due to the small size of their holdings, were unable to use machinery at an efficient level) to extract an income adequate for the reproduction of the unit and so the owners of the land migrated. In contrast, those who grew vegetables, and especially early vegetables in greenhouses, were able to survive with small parcels of land. As mentioned earlier, both Vergopoulos and Burgel argue the opposite, that is they believe that a very small, if any, percentage of agricultural land in Greece is rented, and what is, is rented on a largely sharecropping basis.

Finally, contrary to the evolutionist theories which claim that with the growth of the capitalist mode of production (CMP) agriculture will follow the same path as industry, both Mouzelis and Vergopoulos see simple commodity production (SCP) prevailing in rural Greece and both agree that small land ownership based on family labour will not disappear. However, according to Vergopoulos, small private land holding – characterized by high productivity and low income – persists because it is functional to the requirements of the CMP. Mouzelis believes that the present structure of Greek agriculture and the maintenance of small land ownership must be analysed as a product of, first, a negative articulation of the CMP and SCP in Greece – that is, there is no positive complementarity between the two sectors and both productivity an...