The Asia Minor disaster
Greeks of working age emigrated to the United States between 1899 and 1911. Greece’s economy was then put under immense strain during the Balkan Wars and the First World War, meaning that by 1922 Greece was dependent not only on foreign loans, but also on food imports. The influx of the Asia Minor Greeks, while an enormous drain on the state’s budget, prompted both the expansion of Greek agriculture and the revitalization of Greece’s industrial sector. Both the Refugee Settlement Commission (RSC), an organization created by the League of Nations in December 1923, and the Greek government advocated for the settlement of refugees in Greece’s rural northern regions, though for differing motives. The RSC argued that, due to the influx of refugees, the production of f oodstuffs ought to be Greece’s highest priority. The RSC also believed that the refugees could balance the vacuum left by the expulsion of Muslim farmers, and thus contribute to Greece’s economi c recovery. For these reasons, a significant proportion of the RSC’s expenditure (86.35 percent) was on the settlement of rural refugees, despite this group only constituting 46 percent of the refugee population. 15 The Greek state, fearing peasant radicalism and its lack of control over Greece’s northern territories, supported the rural settlement of refugees and land reform initiatives. A government decree in February 1923 allowed the expropriation of estates without the advance compensation of landowners, enabling the Greek government to begin the requisition of large areas of agricultural land. The RSC made considerable improvements to Greece’s agricultural industry through its refugee settlement operation, which had settled over half a million refugees in a total of 1,381 settlements by 1929. 16 One of the RSC’s first achievements was the execution of a cadastral survey covering over two million acres. This operation was on a scale hitherto unseen in northern Greece. Other achievements include the construction of around 60,000 houses by 1929; the provision of livestock, seed and new agricultural equipment including tractors and steel ploughs to farmers; the improvement of local infrastructure through the construction of facilities such as roads and schools; and the adoption of modern farming te chniques, such as crop rotation and polyculture. The success of the RSC’s programme can be observed in the expansion of cultivated land in Macedonia and western Thrace: in Macedonia, land under cultivation increased from 275 million stremmata 17 in 1922 to 550 million in 1931; in western Thrace, it grew from 72 million to 148 million stremmata during this period. 18 Furthermore, Greece saw remarkable increases in agricultural production during these years: in 1924, the year the RSC commenced its programme, total production of cereal crops was 544,729 tonnes; by 1928, this figure had grown to over one million tonnes. Wheat production also grew, from 210,226 tonnes in 1924 to 450,200 tonnes in 1928, and mports of wheat decreased (from 407,161 tonnes in 1924 to 313,605 tonnes in 1926), increasing Greece’s food security. Finally, the production of tobacco grew to an impressive extent during this period: between 1922 and 1929, total tobacco production tripled, from 25,300 tonnes to 85,944 tonnes, and tobacco became Greece’s main export crop. 19
15 Kontogiorgi, E. (2003) ‘Economic Consequences following Refugee Settlement in Greek Macedonia, 1923- 1932’, in Hirschon, R. ed. Crossing the Aegean: An Appraisal of the 1922 Compulsory Population Exchange between Greece and Turkey . Oxford: p. 66. 16 This figure includes both new refugee colonies and existing communities, the majority of which were rural. 17 One stremma is equal to 0.2471 acre. 18 Mazower, M. (1991) Greece and the Inter-war Economic Crisis . Oxford: p. 79. 19 Official Journal , October 1928, League of Nations, pp. 1691-1692.
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