Land Reform and Farming in Interwar Europe

This chapter looks at land reform, which contributed to a significant drop in inequality in interwar Europe. In Eastern Europe especially, large estates were broken up, and a fifth of all farmland transferred to marginal farmers and landless workers. Redistributive land reforms helped provide economic and political stability, but policymakers were divided between aiding those farmers living in acute poverty, and increasing the production of cheap food for urban consumers. Everywhere governments had too little land to distribute as many of the expropriated estates had been reasonably cultivated, and weak economic growth kept significant amounts of labour employed in agriculture. The land reforms successfully created employment and maintained consumption levels for the poor during the depths of the economic depression. They also restricted communist influence in the region, and avoided major rural conflicts, such as took place in Italy and Spain where large numbers of landless workers were still found. However, the fact that farmers received insufficient land limited market specialization slowed the supply of cheap food for the cities and restricted incentives to organize politically.