One Grain, One Nation: Rice Genetics and the Corporate State in Early Francoist Spain (1939–1952)

Abstract

This paper aims to show the links between rice genetics and the corporatist political economy of early Francoism. After investigating the transition from prewar rice producers' associations to a new federation embedded in a vertical union, I identify three main novelties of the new organization: its national scope, its need to address lack of supply rather than overproduction, and its hierarchical functioning. I then focus on the one state-owned agricultural station devoted to rice research, showing how its agricultural scientists shaped, and relied on, the state-controlled unions, both for producing and distributing new varieties of rice and for controlling the seeds farmers used. Finally, I explore how this relationship made it possible for the scientists to test, multiply, and distribute throughout the Spanish landscape the seeds they produced at the laboratory, thus putting hierarchical unity and autarky to work and demonstrating the role of scientists as active agents of state formation and landscape transformation within a corporatist political economy.