Introduction
State intervention in European agriculture underwent dramatic changes after the agricultural crisis of the late nineteenth century. Mainly limited until that time to trade policy, the role of the state now expanded into many more areas: education, scientific innovation, and market regulations on the quality (and even the quantity) of produce and prices.Footnote 1 At the same time, after the crisis the countryside underwent growing social and political mobilisation, with the spread of cooperatives and other agricultural associations.Footnote 2 The state played an essential role in regulating their framework and, eventually, in promoting their expansion with specific legislation as well as technical and financial support. Agricultural associations, in turn, were vital intermediaries in the implementation of agricultural policies.
In Spain, state intervention in agriculture in the early twentieth century was less extensive than in other western European countries. Although after 1900 the role of the state certainly expanded, the Ministry of Agriculture did not exist as a single institution until 1933, and the ability of the state to implement farming policies was hampered by the weakness of the administrative bodies and by insufficient funding.Footnote 3 Moreover, the state was reluctant to promote farmers’ associations because the dominant landowners, who controlled the parliament through rigged elections, feared social and political mobilisation.Footnote 4 Most scholars have pointed out that agricultural cooperatives appeared later in Spain than in other western European countries, and their diffusion was weak.Footnote 5
Within Spain, Catalonia was a notable exception to the rule. Catalonia was one of the regions where agricultural associations spread most rapidly in the early twentieth century, and indeed a third of the country’s agricultural chambers were created there after the decree of 14th November 1890, which was the first legislative measure passed in Spain to promote agricultural associations. In the early twentieth century, Catalonia was also one of the regions with the most agricultural cooperatives.Footnote 6 Before 1936, Catalonia was home to 70 per cent of Spain’s wine cooperatives, although it accounted for roughly 20 per cent of the country’s vineyards.Footnote 7
From the turn of the century onwards, the Catalan large landowners were very active in promoting cooperatives and other agricultural associations, and the main landowners’ association (IACSI) tried to organise and take control of the spread of these new entities. In 1899 they founded the first regional federation of agricultural associations in Spain (the Catalan Federation of Agricultural Associations, expanded in 1902 to the Balearic Islands), which comprised of more than one hundred cooperatives and other agricultural associations. At its 1901 congress, this agricultural federation launched the initiative for the approval of the Agricultural Syndicates Act to boost the creation of agricultural cooperatives before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936.Footnote 8
Within Spain, Catalonia was also the only region to create institutions of self-government before 1936. In 1914 the region achieved limited autonomy with the creation of an administrative organisation named the Mancomunitat, which coordinated the provincial services. A regional government was set up, with limited competencies and financial resources (only those corresponding to provincial bodies), which lasted until 1924; it was then suspended by the dictator Miguel Primo de Rivera, who would finally do away with it altogether in March 1925. The political framework for the creation of regional governments could have been applied in other Spanish regions, but the Catalan government was the only one that came into being.Footnote 9
This article analyses the agricultural policy of the regional government of Catalonia over this period, highlighting the crucial role played by cooperatives, and also the influence of politics. The agricultural policy was part of a state-building project based on a regionalist ideology, in which the Catalan authorities tried to compensate for the limited economic aid provided by the Spanish state.
The next section is an overview of the agricultural policy of the Catalan regional government. The following section describes the Conference on Catalan Agriculture organised in 1919 by the regional government, in which the aims of this agricultural policy were reflected. Two further sections analyse, respectively, the roles of cooperatives and of politics in this agricultural policy. The article ends with some brief conclusions.
The agricultural policy of the Mancomunitat
The economic policies of the Mancomunitat were mainly oriented towards the modernisation of public services and territorial organisation (that is, the construction of roads, schools, libraries, telephone lines and other facilities), in order to help to spread the economic development of Barcelona to the whole of Catalonia.Footnote 10 According to its leaders, the development of the Catalan economy had been constrained by the deficiencies of public services provided by the central government in the past century. In 1920, the president of the regional government compared the poor state of public services in Catalonia to those of the European countries that were devastated by the war:
In the ravaged countries they lack public buildings, the roads have been destroyed, the bridges have sunk … In Catalonia, due to the tradition of bad governments, we also suffer from this devastation. We have not suffered the suffocating gases of the enemy, but we have suffered the suffocating effects of long-standing neglect, which has meant that the country lacks the tools that are needed for its development.Footnote 11
As a reaction to this situation, the task of the Mancomunitat was to modernise public services in a framework of regional planning in order to boost the development of the Catalan economy. In the area of agriculture, its aim was to promote education and technical change so as to make farms more productive and competitive in the international markets; it thus followed the example of other nations that were creating specialised schools, institutes, laboratories and training centres. In 1919, the regional government stated:
Farming in the way we are doing it today is not enough. It is necessary to intensify production using the applications of the biological, chemical and mechanical sciences; we have to organise production in order to enter the world markets, since isolation is impossible, and we have to be able to transform agricultural products into useful foodstuffs (milk, wine, oil, canned food). These objectives are achieved with a general improvement of the agricultural culture, with the proper training of technicians in order to make the most of the land and take advantage of its crops, and with government-sponsored action that guides the dispersed activities in a fruitful orientation.Footnote 12
Farming intensification and industrial processing of agricultural products were also important targets in order to guarantee the social stability of the Catalan countryside. Since the late nineteenth-century crisis there had been social unrest in some areas, especially wine-growing lands, and the government relied on improvements in production to enhance the viability of farms and avoid social conflict. As the regional government did not have jurisdiction to legislate on land property, no measures for land reform were taken, the rabassaire struggle was never discussed, and social stability in the Catalan countryside depended on the economic modernisation.Footnote 13
Given the focus on education and technical change, the Upper School of Agriculture was a central institution in this programme. It was to contribute to the transformation of Catalan agriculture by training a new generation of experts in agriculture and cattle farming, conducting research and encouraging the diffusion of new techniques. Although in this area the central government promoted projects such as the viticultural and oenological centres of Vilafranca (1902) and Reus (1906), they were insufficient and there was no general plan for education in agriculture.Footnote 14
The Upper School of Agriculture was created in 1912 by the provincial government of Barcelona to replace the old school founded the previous century, and it was reorganised by the regional government following the model of other such schools in Europe such as the Agricultural and Horticulture School of Gembloux in Belgium.Footnote 15 The number of students that attended the school was limited (fewer than seventy in the courses with the highest enrolment: 1920–3), but the Mancomunitat’s leaders were confident that the school would train an elite able to disseminate scientific and technical knowledge.
An agricultural laboratory was also set up to carry out chemical analyses for institutions and individual farmers,Footnote 16 and in 1917 the Mancomunitat organised several Agricultural Technical Services to spread innovations and provide technical assistance to farmers. These services were conceived of as a complement to the educational functions of the Upper School of Agriculture, and they organised itinerant teaching courses in villages to provide technical training for farmers, just as the Upper School of Agriculture had done since 1915.Footnote 17 At the beginning, this itinerant teaching was carried out on a small scale, but these short specialised courses proved very successful, ‘making it necessary to raise the number of courses on offer and to increase the funding’.Footnote 18 The Agricultural Technical Services also created a network of thirty-four experimental landholdings devoted to a range of different crops in Catalan villages; they organised numerous conferences, exhibitions, publications, prizes and campaigns to bring the new agricultural innovations to a wider public, and also provided legal and technical assistance for the cooperatives.
However, farm support policies were difficult to implement, because the competencies and economic resources of the Mancomunitat were very limited: the central government did not transfer any state competencies; nor did it assign any new funds or allow the creation of any new taxes. The financial resources of the Mancomunitat depended mainly on the provincial government of Barcelona (in fact some 75 per cent of the resources of the regional government came from this source) and on borrowing.
The limited economic means were, indeed, the most significant barrier to the development of the regional government’s policies. Its expenditure on agriculture, cattle farming and forestry amounted to 3.4 million pesetas, barely 2.5 per cent of the Catalan government’s total expenditure during the whole period (1914–24), a miniscule sum in comparison with its spending on public works and communications (30 per cent) or even on culture and education (7 per cent).Footnote 19
Nevertheless, given the limited role played by the Spanish government in Catalan agriculture, the agricultural policy of the Mancomunitat was far more significant, a fact much emphasised by the Catalan government. According to its calculation, when the Mancomunitat was established in 1914, the total expenditure of the Spanish government in Catalonia amounted to nineteen million pesetas, invested mainly in public works (80 per cent), while the expenditure on agricultural services amounted to only 373,450 pesetas (1.9 per cent).Footnote 20
The Mancomunitat’s goal was to use its scarce financial resources to compensate for the inertia of the Spanish government in the area of agriculture and elsewhere – a lack of activity that was often highlighted by the Catalan government. For instance, regarding cattle farming, when the Mancomunitat was set up and the zootechnical studies began, the new government stated:
it was unknown what livestock breeds were in Catalonia, what was the value of the livestock, how this wealth was passed on, what its state of progress was, or what its place in the Catalan economy was. It was unknown whether livestock farming provided enough wealth to devote to it; whether it was susceptible to improvement, bearing in mind the idiosyncrasies of farmers and the rural economy, and, if so, what means should be used to position our cattle farming in accordance with our time and with the possibilities of the economy … two hundred years of centralist administration or, in other words, of absolute abandonment, could not produce any other effects than those of a totally obsolete form of cattle farming.Footnote 21
To obviate (or at least to limit) the financial restrictions, the regional government created a public savings bank shortly afterwards; it was approved on 6th May 1914, only one month after the creation of the regional government on 6th April. The bank aimed to provide credit for rural villages for public works and improvements, and also for agricultural cooperatives to carry out building work and to purchase machinery. But its capacity was limited; as it could not lend money at a low interest rate, its potential influence was restricted.
The agricultural policy of the Mancomunitat had to face another obstacle: the brevity of its mandate. Though it was created in 1914, the competencies for agriculture were transferred only some years later. The Upper School of Agriculture was transferred to the regional government in 1918, when it began to organise the agricultural technical services. The Viticulture and Oenology Service, the Cereals Service and the Fruit and Olive Trees Service were created in 1918; the Cattle Farming Service and the Social Agrarian Action Service were created in 1919, and the Agricultural Analysis Laboratory was transferred to the regional government in the same year; the Forestry Service and the Institute of Agricultural Mechanics were created in 1920. In 1921, the regional government purchased an agricultural estate for practical training, where a new Zootechnical School was to be housed. However, this project was delayed and, after Primo de Rivera’s coup d’état in 1923, it was suspended (along with other projects of the regional government)Footnote 22 and the agricultural technical services were closed down.
However, according to a qualified observer, the agricultural services that the Mancomunitat had created were so solid and well organised that ‘they could have honoured the most demanding modern state; … they endured the shock of the military dictatorship and passed on almost undamaged to the new regional government’,Footnote 23 which reopened them in 1931 under the Second Spanish Republic. In his view, ‘in no other branch of culture did the regional government go so far, starting from nothing; … the miracle happened precisely because there was nothing organized by the state … and there were no closed walls or dead weights of created interests, … obstacles that make organizations as impervious as they are impenetrable’.Footnote 24
The Conference on Catalan Agriculture (1919)
In 1919 the Catalan government organised a ‘Conference on Catalan Agriculture’ (significantly, it was initially named ‘Conference of Agricultural Associations’), which was to bring together in Barcelona several hundreds of delegates of agricultural associations from all over Catalonia, to discuss the future development of agriculture in Catalonia.Footnote 25 The conference was organised thematically, in the following four sessions: ‘Legal Organization of Catalan Agricultural Production’, ‘Insurances in Agriculture’, ‘Agricultural Credit’ and ‘Agrarian Social Organisation of Catalonia’.
These sessions were to focus on four fundamental issues for the development of Catalan agriculture. The first was the establishment of social norms of mutual respect for all the actors involved in agricultural production, in order to intensify the cultivation and thus increase individual and collective wealth. The second was the improvement of the farmers’ protection from crop losses in order to guarantee the sector’s economic stability. The third was the creation of an agricultural bank to help cooperatives expand their produce and improve its commercialisation, avoiding market fluctuations. The final issue was the development of agricultural associations,Footnote 26 which were ‘totally deprived of any precise guidelines’.Footnote 27
Josep M. Rendé, who was to lead the fourth session, summarised the socio-economic doctrine of the conference in three words: Brotherhood, Well-being and Wealth. But these three objectives could not be attained without the social organisation of agriculture, which made the fourth issue essential for its development: ‘without social organisation of agriculture there is no credit, no insurance, no brotherhood, or anything else’.Footnote 28 Rendé stated that all the lecturers at the conference concluded their presentations by stressing the urgent need for agricultural associations, and encouraging the Catalan government to promote the creation of agricultural cooperatives by all the means at their disposal.
The project that Rendé was to present at the conference included the organisation of all existing cooperatives into county federations as well as a general organisation with authority over federations, with specialised economic sections for each crop, as ‘the only way to bring together in a single system all wine growers, olive growers, livestock farmers, etc., etc., in Catalonia’.Footnote 29 Rendé conceived of the organisation of Catalan agricultural cooperatives in thirty-eight county federations. Some of these federations had already been created, and in some cases there were cooperative organisations that were already carrying out these functions.Footnote 30 However, the geographical limits of the existing federations had to be re-established and their functions had to be specified. To sum up, as he pointed out, ‘some agricultural cooperatives had been created, but not enough, and the existing ones had to be consolidated; some federations had been created, but many more were needed, and the existing ones had to be consolidated and needed some guidelines’;Footnote 31 finally, a global confederation had to be created.Footnote 32
The ‘Conference on Catalan Agriculture’, scheduled to take place in Barcelona on 7th to 9th May 1919, was finally called off by the military authorities because of the social unrest in the city. The projected agrarian bank for agricultural cooperatives was never created, and the confederation of agricultural cooperatives was not set up until 1931, under the Second Republic.Footnote 33 Nevertheless, the way the conference was prepared and the issues that were to be discussed clearly reflect the aims of the Mancomunitat regarding agricultural policy, placing the cooperatives at the forefront at all times.
The role of the cooperatives
Agricultural cooperatives became key agents in the educational missions of the agricultural services of the Mancomunitat: first, because the scarce funding by the regional government for farm support policies meant that the cooperatives had a vital role to play in the modernisation of agriculture; and secondly, because the dissemination of innovations and technical developments had longer-lasting effects when cooperatives were used as channels of transmission.Footnote 34 In other words, to modernise agriculture it was necessary to enhance not only human capital but social capital as well, and in both these endeavours the role of cooperatives was essential.
The Mancomunitat soon began to study ways of promoting agricultural cooperatives. In 1916, an agreement was made to provide technical and economic assistance for the foundation and functioning of agricultural cooperatives, taking into account ‘the beneficial results that this type of institution, now beginning to spread in our country, has achieved abroad … We are convinced, by the contemplation of the situation beyond our borders, that cooperatives are an instrument capable of building profound economic and social transformations.’Footnote 35 In 1919, the Mancomunitat set up the Social Agrarian Action Service, whose aim was to promote the creation of cooperatives (especially ones that carried out the industrial transformation of agricultural products, such as cooperative wineries and cooperative olive oil mills with high value-added production) and to provide guidelines and legal assistance for their functioning.
Josep M. Rendé was appointed head of the Social Agrarian Action Service, which was considered ‘one of the most important services created by the regional government’.Footnote 36 Rendé was a landowner who had been very active in organising agricultural cooperatives: in 1913, he had founded one of the first wine cooperatives in Catalonia, and in 1916 he set up the first agricultural federation with more than twenty agricultural cooperatives and cooperative wineries.Footnote 37 A few months before his appointment to lead the Social Agrarian Action Service, he was to present his vision of the ‘Agrarian social organisation of Catalonia’ at the Mancomunitat’s ‘Conference on Catalan Agriculture’ mentioned in the previous section. As noted above, the conference was finally suspended, but as head of the Social Agrarian Action Service, Rendé had the opportunity to bring his idea to fruition.
Rendé used his previous experience to boost the cooperative movement ‘so that there would be no village in Catalonia without a cooperative or agricultural association’.Footnote 38 Rendé’s cooperative model followed the example of these associations, which brought together large and small landowners as well as sharecroppers. The focus of these cooperatives was mainly technical and economic, and social and political questions were avoided. According to Rendé, ‘the agricultural cooperative must be the means to obtain the highest price of the main product of the land’,Footnote 39 which meant using cooperation for the industrial processing of agricultural products such as wine, oil, and flour, so that large and small producers could take advantage of the cooperative services in spite of the social differences.
Rendé gave many lectures on cooperation (sixty out of the seventy-one organised by the Social Agrarian Action Service between 1920 and 1923) and participated in many meetings where the creation of new agricultural cooperatives was discussed. About one third of these lectures (twenty-two) focused on cooperative wineries and were each attended by between 100 and 350 participants, making a total of 4,410 (35 per cent of the 12,565 participants at these meetings). Other topics discussed at these meetings were the rural savings banks (nine, with 1,590 participants), cooperative olive oil mills (five, with 900 participants) and cooperative distilleries (three, with 380 participants).Footnote 40
The foundation of cooperative wineries was, as can be seen, an important objective of the Mancomunitat. In fact, some of the lectures were organised as a final step in the process of the foundation of wine cooperatives. From 1917 to 1924 (the period when the agricultural technical services were functioning), fifty-one cooperative wineries were created in Catalonia, nearly two thirds of the total number that were founded before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936.Footnote 41 More than half of them had been assisted by the agricultural technical services of the Mancomunitat in various ways: planning the construction of new cellars and modifying or enlarging old ones, providing advice regarding the machinery to be acquired, and in some cases assisting in the process of winemaking.Footnote 42
The Social Agrarian Action Service was involved in the creation of some thirty cooperatives, including two federations, fourteen rural savings banks and ten cooperative wineries. It also assisted in the drafting or modification of more than seventy statutes of cooperative entities.Footnote 43 The service arranged for the participation of agricultural cooperatives at three commercial exhibitions in Barcelona and helped more than one hundred Catalan cooperatives to take part in the Exhibition of Cooperation and Social Works held in Ghent, Belgium, in 1924.Footnote 44
The regional government also aimed to provide financial assistance to agricultural cooperatives. As noted above, ever since 1914 the public savings bank had provided loans to agricultural cooperatives. The amounts lent could not exceed 50 per cent of the assets that were offered as a guarantee, which were mortgaged with the joint responsibility of the cooperative members. In addition, the annual payments could not exceed 75 per cent of their average net revenues, and the projects were supervised by the credit bureau.Footnote 45 But the limited capacity of this savings bank restricted its activity, and it was unable to provide credit at a low interest rate. As Rendé acknowledged, the interest rate offered by the savings bank was too high for the agricultural cooperatives, which were forced to borrow money from private banks or from their own rural savings banks.Footnote 46
In 1921, since the public savings bank could not attend to the needs of the numerous agricultural cooperatives, a project was presented in the Mancomunitat assembly for the creation of a Cooperative Agricultural Bank by the existing local agricultural savings banks and cooperatives, with the support of the regional government. The project aimed to bring together the agricultural cooperatives of Catalonia under the auspices of the new savings bank, in which the financial deposits of Catalan farmers would be centralised and from where the funds for Catalan agriculture would be obtained, according to the needs of each county. The Mancomunitat would provide its initial capital with a loan of ten million pesetas (with an issue of 20,000 shares of five hundred pesetas) and would have a stake in the management of the bank until the initial capital was repaid. From then onwards, the bank would be managed only by the agricultural cooperatives participating inside it, and without any political intervention.Footnote 47 But this project was not even discussed, as it was considered beyond the possibilities of the regional government at that time. To avoid any discussion, the president of the Mancomunitat concluded: ‘We already have the instrument: our public savings bank. What is missing is the money … We have to be realistic. When we have the means, we will do what we can: modest things, possibly; not miracles.’Footnote 48
Between 1918 and 1922, only thirty agricultural cooperatives applied to borrow funds from the public savings bank; and, after an assessment of their situation, only ten received loans.Footnote 49 The total amount lent to agricultural cooperatives was 757,250 pesetas (some 18 per cent of the public savings bank’s capital) ranging between 20,000 and 150,000 pesetas, with repayment periods of fifteen to fifty years. The loans were mainly used for the construction of wine cellars and olive oil mills. For the construction and fitting out of wine cellars the financial assistance of the regional government amounted to 447,100 pesetas (60 per cent of the loans provided for cooperatives); but only six cooperative wineries received financial assistance of the fifty or so that were created between 1917 and 1924.Footnote 50 So most of the wine cooperatives had to look for funding elsewhere. A plan drawn up by the Catalan government to create a Technical Service for Agricultural Constructions to assist the building of cooperative cellars and olive oil mills had to be abandoned in 1918 because of the lack of funding.Footnote 51
Cooperatives also played a critical role in avoiding class conflict in the countryside, not just by facilitating technical improvements and making farms more competitive, but also because they were cross-class associations that included both landowners and sharecroppers. When the Mancomunitat created the Social Agrarian Action Service in 1919, the vine sharecroppers were mobilising in the Catalan countryside, a process that led to the creation of the largest peasants’ union, the Union of Rabassaires, in 1922.Footnote 52 It was no coincidence that the campaigns launched by the Social Agrarian Action Service to promote agricultural cooperatives coincided directly with this period of social struggle. As one of the deputies of the Mancomunitat put it: ‘an agricultural cooperative is a true mixed association. In it, owners, sharecroppers and workers live together and co-operate … It is in essence a conservative association, in the noble sense of the word: it is the only means of giving development to all forms of foresight and mutuality, which, in the end, are nothing else than conservative institutions. For this reason, from a political and economic point of view, it is more practical to favour and strengthen cooperatives than to pass a law to favour land reform.’Footnote 53
This was precisely the reason why sharecroppers’ unions were reluctant to accept this type of agricultural cooperative. In their press they stated that they stood for ‘class entities, as are the workers’ cooperatives of consumption and production’, and against ‘the habit of creating mixed unions [of landowners and sharecroppers], which block the good results of their work’.Footnote 54 The Union of Rabassaires challenged this cooperative orientation and defended the creation of sharecroppers’ cooperatives without any tutelage from landowners. Some cooperatives aligned with the sharecroppers’ federation were so angered by the regional government’s ideological orientation in favour of landowners that they decided to cancel their subscription to the Mancomunitat’s newspaper.Footnote 55
The role of politics
As mentioned above, early agricultural policy in Catalonia had a very small budget within the already limited financial resources available to the Mancomunitat. Agricultural modernisation was only one of many programmes within a much broader policy of human capital formation, modernisation of the Catalan economy, and territorial organisation envisioned by the regionalist party the Lliga, which led the Mancomunitat throughout its existence. Its creation was an initiative of one of the founders of the party, Prat de la Riba, who was the president of the provincial government of Barcelona from 1907 and leader of the Mancomunitat from its beginnings in 1914 until his sudden death in 1917. He was succeeded by another member of the Lliga, Puig i Cadafalch, until the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera put an end to the Catalan autonomous government in January 1924.
The Lliga had been founded in 1901 by sectors of the Catalan bourgeoisie as a reaction to the political crisis in Spain in the late nineteenth century, after the loss of the American colonies of Cuba and Puerto Rico. Disappointed with the role of the Spanish government and aware that Catalan interests were different from the rest of the country, its leaders aimed to gain autonomy for Catalonia in order to promote the region’s economic, political and cultural interests, as well as to regenerate Spanish politics.Footnote 56 The Lliga had immediate electoral success after its foundation, not only in Barcelona but in rural districts as well, and its political influence increased steadily from 1901 to 1923 (when Primo de Rivera’s military coup d’état suspended elections), but especially after 1914, when the Mancomunitat was created.
In the early twentieth century, Catalonia was the most industrialised region in Spain, yet its influence in Spanish politics was slight. The central government was not given to favouring Catalan interests. But the Lliga was not just the party of the Catalan industrial bourgeoisie:Footnote 57 its ideologues and leadership came mostly from a rural conservative background, and its growing political influence was also based on the support of rural landowners. The party’s position on the agrarian sector was summarised by the Marquis of Camps; in Catalonia, he said, unlike other Spanish regions, the agrarian problem was solved by the existing civil agrarian institutions, which had traditionally harmonised the combination of capital, land and labour. The marquis also highlighted the need for the creation of agricultural cooperatives.Footnote 58
The regional government of the Mancomunitat comprised members of the Lliga and other political parties, but the Lliga always held the presidency and its leadership was undisputed, firstly because of its political strength in the provincial elections, and also because the limited competencies and resources of the Mancomunitat left hardly any room for political disputes inside the government.Footnote 59 Moreover, Prat de la Riba was successful in involving members of other parties in the Mancomunitat’s programme of economic modernisation, human capital formation and cultural development. Significantly, the agricultural department of the regional government was headed not by members of the Lliga, but by two Catalanist republicans; however, both of them were politically moderate landowners, who came not from the province of Barcelona (the centre of the rabassaire struggle) but from areas where inter-class agricultural cooperatives were developing smoothly.Footnote 60
In 1920, at a time of acute social unrest in Catalonia and against the background of the discussions of land reform in several European countries, the Mancomunitat presented a project ‘to accomplish a more equal distribution of revenues, without damaging the principles of justice or undermining the general wealth’.Footnote 61 The project was designed to provide financial assistance to sharecroppers to purchase land and to create affordable housing in rural towns (with fewer than ten thousand inhabitants), in order to discourage the migration of agricultural workers to the cities. However, the plan was hampered by the lack of financial resources and in 1921 it was still being discussed in the assembly, albeit as a general project ‘to indicate the orientation of the future involvement of the Mancomunitat in the agrarian social question’,Footnote 62 without the proposals of any specific measures.
The agricultural programmes of the Mancomunitat avoided land redistribution and any contractual changes that would have diminished the political support from landowners, and relied on economic modernisation alone to reduce social discontent. In doing so, they strengthened the Lliga’s political power, playing down the struggle between landowners and sharecroppers that had mobilised other left-wing political parties such as the republicans, who had given strong support to the rabassaires.Footnote 63
The promotion of agricultural cooperatives sought to spread technical change, but also aimed to maintain the social stability of the Catalan countryside by limiting the spread of unions and class associations. Last but not least, it also sought to reinforce the Lliga’s political influence, which was based on the support both of the industrial bourgeoisie and middle classes in Barcelona and other cities, and of rural Catalonia as well. The agricultural cooperatives and other agricultural associations that had participated in the social and political mobilisation in the Catalan countryside since the late nineteenth-century agrarian crisis also played a significant role in the Lliga’s political success.
Conclusion
In the early twentieth century, Catalan agriculture had to deal with two important challenges: first, the introduction of technical changes to increase productivity and thus compete in the international markets, and second, the maintenance of social stability. These challenges, which in fact were the same as the ones facing other European countries, were not easy to meet without state assistance. The Mancomunitat tried to compensate for the limited intervention of the central Spanish government in Catalan agriculture by developing an early agricultural policy based on education and technical assistance to promote farming intensification and the industrial processing of agricultural products.
As the Mancomunitat had very limited competencies and economic resources for farm support policies, the creation of agricultural cooperatives seemed to offer a solution for the modernisation of agriculture. The regional government sought to promote the creation of cooperatives as channels of transmission of technical change and provided guidelines for their functioning.
The government’s role in maintaining social stability in the Catalan countryside was also important. When Rendé envisioned the organisation of Catalan agriculture divided into local cooperatives, county federations, and a global confederation, his project aimed to encourage technical change inside the Catalan agricultural system, but also to create a more organised rural society and thus to prevent social tensions. The Mancomunitat did not have competencies for legislating on land ownership, and the Lliga’s political agenda did not include any changes on land ownership or farming contracts. The social stability of the Catalan countryside was regarded as a by-product of the economic modernisation of agriculture and of the social organisation of agriculture based on cooperatives. This belief was shared by the leaders of the Mancomunitat, and the staff in charge of its agricultural technical services.
Finally, though, this objective was not fulfilled. The Catalan government supported the cooperative movement, but by 1923, when Primo de Rivera’s military coup d’état put an end to its agricultural policies, many rural villages had not yet set up their agricultural cooperatives; only a few federations had been founded, and the Catalan confederation of agricultural cooperatives had not been created. In stark contrast, when the Union of Rabassaires was founded in 1922, it placed the class struggle at the forefront of its agenda, and it fiercely opposed the cross-class agricultural cooperatives promoted by the Catalan government.
Catalonia’s early agricultural policy was revived under the Second Spanish Republic (1931–6), when the region received a new government, the Generalitat, with more competencies and resources than its predecessor the Mancomunitat between 1914 and 1924. The new Catalan government was led by a new left-leaning party, Esquerra Republicana, and it was supported by the Union of Rabassaires, which had become Catalonia’s largest agricultural union. The new Catalan government sought to favour the sharecroppers’ interests, and proposed legislation in the Catalan parliament regarding contract farming, which had become the most pressing question in the political arena, at a time of growing social tensions between landowners and sharecroppers.
In the 1930s, the new Catalan government did not subordinate the issue of social stability to the economic modernisation of agriculture, but the Mancomunitat’s project to promote agricultural education and technical change was revived: the agricultural technical services that the dictatorship had closed down were reopened, and the staff and the heads of the department were reappointed.Footnote 64 Like the Mancomunitat before it, the new regional government saw technical education and the promotion of cooperatives as key elements of its agricultural policy. But again, it was to prove short-lived: in July 1936, Franco’s coup set in motion a civil war that would last three years and would put an end to the Catalan autonomous government and all its policies.
Acknowledgements
An earlier version of this article was presented at the EURHO Rural History Conference, Paris, 10th to 13th September 2019. The author is grateful for all the comments that he received from the participants in the panel ‘Organized Capitalism within Agriculture: Agricultural Associations and State Intervention in the European Agriculture, 1880s–1930s’ as well as from the editors and referees of the journal Rural History. Funding was provided by the Government of Spain (RTI2018-093970-B-C33: MCIU/AEI/FEDER, EU) and by the regional Government of Catalonia (2017SGR1466: Generalitat de Catalunya).
