ABSTRACT
The interwar period was extraordinarily turbulent for world agriculture due to the First World War, its consequences, the Depression of the thirties, and the measures taken by the different governments in response to it. It was also a period of transition for agriculture in the developed countries, with the onset or deepening of fundamental changes: the shift from extensive to intensive growth; from free markets to state intervention; and, finally, from complementarity to competition in world agricultural trade. Also, the interwar period witnessed a major change in the development model of the world’s periphery and one of its distinctive characteristics was the active participation of the state in the economy. In the agricultural sector, this was clearly manifested in at least three ways which began to be expressed in the interwar years and definitively consolidated in the second post-war period: anti-agricultural bias policies, urban consumer protection, and marketing boards.
