Agriculture in Capitalist Europe, 1945–1960

From food shortages to food surpluses

Carin Martiin, Juan Pan-Montojo, Paul Brassley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781315465913
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

In the years before the Second World War agriculture in most European states was carried out on peasant or small family farms using technologies that relied mainly on organic inputs and local knowledge and skills, supplying products into a market that was partly local or national, partly international. The war applied a profound shock to this system. In some countries farms became battlefields, causing the extensive destruction of buildings, crops and livestock. In others, farmers had to respond to calls from the state for increased production to cope with the effects of wartime disruption of international trade. By the end of the war food was rationed when it was obtainable at all. Only fifteen years later the erstwhile enemies were planning ways of bringing about a single agricultural market across much of continental western Europe, as farmers mechanised, motorized, shed labour, invested capital, and adopted new technologies to increase output. This volume brings together scholars working on this period of dramatic technical, commercial and political change in agriculture, from the end of the Second World War to the emergence of the Common Agricultural Policy in the early 1960s. Their work is structured around four themes: the changes in the international political order within which agriculture operated; the emergence of a range of different market regulation schemes that preceded the CAP; changes in technology and the extent to which they were promoted by state policy; and the impact of these political and technical changes on rural societies in western Europe.

1 European agriculture, 1945–1960

An introduction

Paul Brassley, Carin Martiin and Juan Pan-Montojo

This book is about the emergence of modern agriculture in Western Europe. In the years before the Second World War, agriculture in most European states was carried out on peasant or small family farms that still relied substantially on muscle power and other traditional inputs, aided to some extent by technologies that would become established in postwar agriculture. The resultant products were supplied into a market that was partly local and partly international. The Second World War applied a profound shock to this pre-existing system. In some countries, farms became battlefields, with the extensive destruction of buildings, crops and livestock. In others, farmers had to respond to calls from the state for increased production to cope with the effects of wartime disruption of international trade. By the end of the war food was rationed when it was obtainable at all. Only fifteen years later, the erstwhile enemies were planning ways of bringing about a single agricultural market across much of continental Western Europe, as farmers mechanised, motorised, shed labour, invested capital and adopted new technologies to increase output.

The curious thing is that this period of dramatic technical, commercial and political change has been overshadowed, in the historical literature, by the dramatic events that preceded and followed it. While much has been written, and written recently, on the Second World War, and political historians in particular have recently become interested in what the emergence of the Common Agricultural Policy in the early 1960s tells us about the process of European integration, virtually nothing has appeared on the period between these two climactic events since the last edition of Michael Tracy’s classic Agriculture in Western Europe, the bulk of which was written over fifty years ago.¹

The purpose of this book is to fill this partial vacuum in European rural history. How rapid was the postwar recovery? How was it produced? Why was the Second World War not followed by an agricultural depression in the way that the previous global conflict had been? Why did an agricultural population that had been content to survive in their youth or middle age before the war have the confidence to innovate and invest in their middle- or old age after the war? These are the issues that are explored by historians from a dozen different countries, of which some were original members of the Common Agricultural Policy whereas others joined later, with the exception of Switzerland.

Their work is structured around four themes: the changes in the international political order within which agriculture operated; the emergence of a range of different market regulation schemes that preceded the Common Agricultural Policy; changes in technology and the extent to which they were promoted by state policy; and the impact of these political and technical changes on rural societies in Western Europe. First, however, it is desirable to sketch in the major changes in the state of Western European agriculture between the end of the Second World War and the signing of the Treaty of Rome (from which the CAP emerged) in 1957.

Agriculture in Western Europe at the end of the Second World War

There have been several recent accounts of the impact of the Second World War on food and agriculture in Europe.² They all tell stories of food shortages, in some cases to the point of starvation (in Greece and the Netherlands, for example), rationing, the emergence of food substitutes, contrasts between social cohesion and the emergence of black and grey markets, state control, the disruption of traditional patterns of agricultural trade, shortages of labour and other inputs, and the different experiences of the various belligerent and neutral states as far as agricultural production was concerned. In the countries of continental Europe, where the land battles occurred, their impact on land, farm buildings and farm animals was greater than in the UK, where, although there was some damage to farms from aerial attack, much good land became airfields, and less good land military training areas, direct damage was generally less.³ Among the neutral countries, changes in Spanish agriculture were more a result of the Civil War and the autarkic economical programme that was implemented by Franco’s regime, than of the world war. In Portugal there was significant growth in agricultural output, admittedly from a very low base.⁴ Ireland benefited from the proximity of the UK market, whereas the more industrialised Swiss economy was surrounded by belligerent countries and so found it difficult to obtain both food imports and fertilisers. Swedish farmers had to cope with greater levels of bureaucracy and consumers with food rationing, but calorie consumption was only a little below the levels of the 1930s.⁵

One simple way of illustrating these differences is to examine agricultural production and trade figures for the immediate postwar years. The following discussion is concerned only with the major Western European countries. This would have made no sense for a pre-war context, when Eastern European countries were important suppliers of agricultural products to the German market in particular, but should be acceptable for the postwar years, since by the time production in Eastern Europe had recovered enough for exports to be possible, all of the countries involved, with the partial exception of Yugoslavia, had been isolated from Western markets as a result of the political tensions between the USSR and the West. The data source used in Table 1.1 is the FAO Yearbook of Food and Agricultural Statistics, which has the advantage of carrying on and reporting the data collected before the war by the International Institute of Agriculture. Thus, the level of postwar production can be contextualised by comparison with an average of the pre-war years – normally, an a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• 1 European agriculture, 1945–1960 An introduction
• Part I International politics
• Part II Market regulation and the motives behind it
• Part III Technical change
• Part IV Rural society and structural policy
• Conclusion
• Index