Mussolini Dreams of Bread Independence

Mussolini’s dream was a clear one: “The Italian land giving bread to all Italians!” Freeing Italy from the “slavery of foreign grain” was a crucial issue in the political economy of the fascist regime that came to power in 1922. Fascists envisaged Italy as an autarkic economy, able to release itself from dependency on the “plutocratic states” that dominated the world economy: the British Empire and the United States. The closing of the gap with industrialized nations and the building of a Great Italy was to be achieved by a nationalistic development policy promoting domestic industries producing for internal markets and making intensive use of the country’s own resources.

--Tiago Saraiva, Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism, Inside Technology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016), 21.