ITALY: Harvest and Headaches

Thousands of blackshirted Fascists and cheering farmers tramped into a freshly cut wheat field near Aprilia one day last week to hear Premier Benito Mussolini officially open Italy’s harvest season. Bustling up to Aprilia, one of the towns built on land reclaimed from the Pontine Marshes, in his automobile, Il Duce stripped to the waist, clambered atop a threshing machine. There he proceeded to blast away at early-spring predictions by observers in the U. S., Britain and France that Italy’s vital wheat crop would fall far below normal this year. Folding his brawny arms across a tanned torso, Mussolini shouted: “I confirm that this year’s harvest is superior in quality and but little inferior in quantity to that of last year.”

Last year Il Duce won the first victory in his twelve-year “Battle of the Grain,” the drive to make Italy independent of foreign wheat imports. Due to years of intensified cultivation and reclamation of some 6,600,000 acres of swampland, Italian farms last year produced about 300,000,000 bushels, 20,000,000 more than the nor mal national need which was Mussolini’s goal. The coldest, wettest winter since the turn of the Century, followed by a prolonged spring drought led to anticipation that this year’s crop would fall to 220,000,000 bushels. Recent rains came in the nick of time and it is now predicted that the harvest will produce slightly over 250,000,000.

“The Italian people therefore will have the necessary bread to live, but even if it had been lacking, we should never—I say, never—have been compelled to seek any aid whatsoever from those so-called great demo-plutocracies. . . . Comrade mechanics, start the motor. Comrade farmers, the harvest begins,” proclaimed Il Duce. Stepping down from his perch, he pitched in with the threshers, for an hour jerked open stacks of wheat and tossed them into the hopper. He repeated his performance later in Pontinia, Littoria and Sabaudia, three other towns built in the Pontine area (TIME, May 9).

While Italians may have enough bread to eat this year, it will not be the kind they want. Il Duce, ever conscious that in event of war a closed Mediterranean would leave Italy seriously crippled for food and raw materials, annually stores part of the wheat crop as a war measure, sells a sizable portion abroad for needed foreign exchange. Thus last year, while the nation on paper produced enough for home use, Italy in fact suffered a wheat shortage. Bakers, unable to purchase sufficient wheat flour, eked out their dough with substitutes like corn flour, bean flour, ground lentils or ground ceci, yellow, bean-like pellets. The Government legalized this adulteration up to 20% but bakers took advantage of the practice, began turning out queer tasting, colored loaves only 50% wheat flour. Public grumbling grew, scores were clapped into prison for their protests and finally Il Duce stepped in, called his Cereals Corporation into conference.

There two wheat-saving measures were decreed: 1) wheat consumption in the army will be cut down by substituting rice several times a week for the army ration of macaroni; 2) consumption by the nation will be cut down by forcing the people to eat, instead of their familiar white wheat bread, uniformly baked and priced whole wheat loaves, adulterated with 10% corn flour. This week Italian bakers started hauling the new loaves from their ovens and housewives scornfully labeled it “grey bread.” Since the decree, a great propaganda campaign has been staged to convince Italians that the new bread is better for them. Three weeks ago Il Duce’s own newsorgan, 77 Popolo d’ Italia, keynoted: “The new bread is better for a virile nation like Italy because it stimulates man’s procreative qualities and is better suited for the nursing mother whose milk is thereby enriched, than the old-fashioned bread of the democracies, of the snobs, of the fashionables.”

The wheat problem, however, is only one of Premier Mussolini’s many headaches. Italian gold reserves, drained by the Ethiopian campaign, have fallen to $212,000,000. Italy’s adverse trade balance of $300,000,000 last year was the highest since 1930. This year’s is still mounting. Exports have not fallen off materially, but the value of the lira has declined and as a consequence Italy has to pay more for the raw materials, such as coal, oil, which she cannot get at home. On the surface, her industry is prosperous. Heavy industry is making high profits from armaments but, on the other hand, last year’s capital levy has resulted in the bankruptcy of thousands of small firms.

Although the Government nine months ago decreed a 10% to 20% raise in wages, food prices have skyrocketed out of proportion. The ”Battle of the Grain,” while it substantially upped production, has benefited the large landowners who could make use of Government cultivation aids. These landowners annually sell their surplus stocks to the Government at a high price but the average peasant produces only enough for his own needs, has nothing left to sell. Despite frequent cash doles to the peasants, their standard of living has declined so that, especially in the areas south of Naples, some are clothed in tattered rags, live in hovels no better than pigsties.

Thus, although Italy has recently scorned rumors that she is in the market for foreign credits, the thing Mussolini needs most is a headache powder in the form of a big foreign loan. Most likely place to get it is in London and observers believe that when British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain sees his cherished Anglo-Italian pact go into effect with the withdrawal of Italian troops from Spain, the British pocketbook will be invitingly opened.