Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism

In addition to collecting and experimenting with local wheats, the CSAZOI was also responsible for introducing in the colony the high-yield varieties developed by Italian breeders for the Battle of Wheat. The aim was to test these varieties under Ethiopian conditions and to hybridize them with local landraces. The elite seeds were shipped from Italy to Ethiopia through the Colonial Agricultural Institute in Florence led by Maugini. Though Maugini is well known in Italian colonial historiography as an ideologue of Italian imperialism, here I want to emphasize the role of his Florence institute as a center of circulation of seeds between Europe and the Italian African colonies. In 1938 and 1939 the institute shipped about 1,000 varieties of so-called elite seeds from European institutions into Ethiopia, 300 of them cereal ones (wheat, corn, rice, rye, etc.), to be tested by the CSAZAI and its different dependencies in the colony. In the opposite direction, the institute collected from several expeditions through the Ethiopian territory several thousands of samples from local fields to be stored in Florence.

These expeditions constituted the basis of the survey work on the classification of Ethiopian wheats, which led to the important confirmation of the Ethiopian plateau as a Vavilov center of origin for hard wheat together with southwest Asia.[18] According to Nikolai Vavilov’s important theory, the area of the greatest variety of a domesticated plant is also its region of origin, where its wild strains should still exist. Such centers were thus crucial for breeders looking to introduce interesting traits into their crossings.[19] Their importance was asserted by the expedition craze of the interwar period, during which Nazis, Soviets, and North Americans went to the various centers identified by Vavilov in order to control the global genetic resources needed to improve food self-sufficiency through new plant breeds. While Vavilov’s institution in Saint Petersburg would become the first global seed bank, contributing to support Stalin’s projects for industrializing Soviet agriculture, Maugini had similar aspirations for his Florence institute in relation to the Italian colonies: collect diversity in Italian possessions and distribute elite seeds developed by European breeders among white settlers and African peasants.

Hard wheat was not the only interesting crop to have its center of origin in Ethiopia. Coffea arabica also migrated originally from the Ethiopian plateau to the mountains of Yemen and from there into all the other important coffee production areas of the world. Indeed, Italian agronomists were quick to identify coffee as one of the few safe sources of revenues of the new colony.[20] Already before the Italian invasion, 80 percent of the Ethiopian coffee production was being exported and constituted the only major agriculture export of the country.[21] If wheat proved essential to feed the colonial army and the builders of the colonial infrastructure, coffee was the main commodity that enabled Italians to dream of Ethiopia as an important source of revenue. In an alternative formulation, wheat was important so that coffee could be cultivated. Acknowledging the scarcity of data concerning the concrete situation of coffee production in Ethiopia, agriculture experts estimated the total of exports in 1936 to be able to cover a third of Italy’s consumption. In spite of their lack of detailed information, they insisted on the importance of understanding that aggregated production numbers referred to clearly differentiated local realities.

In the eastern regions, in the Harar and the Arussi, there were a few large coffee plantations—some as large as 1,500 hectares—owned by Europeans who bought the properties before Italian occupation and were based on intensive use of wage native labor. These large capitalist operations were surrounded by a multitude of small plots of independent indigenous coffee cultivators. In the valley of the Errer near the capital of the region—Harar, the center of Islamic culture and religion in the Horn of Africa—there were about 10,000 of these small coffee native growers.[22] The coffee type produced in this eastern part of the Ethiopian highlands was the Harari, with characteristically large grains, long shape, and slightly green color. The Harari was the result of the historical transplantation undertaken by Arabs of wild plants from the western parts of the territory, the center of origin of the Arabica, into the valley of the Errer. Italians, in their obsession with condemning the Negus rule, blamed the Abyssinian invasion of the area in 1887 for being responsible for the destruction of many of these Arab coffee plots and their replacement by barley, “thus substituting a rich and promising culture with a poorer one.”[23]