“75 years PAPASTRATOS: feature on the largest tobacco company in Greece”, v. 52, January 2007, KIOSK Magazine (in greek) (original) (raw)

Dimitrios Stergiopoulos, “The Establishment of EOK and State Economic Policy in the Postwar Greek Tobacco Sector” in Commodities in History: Theoretical Reflections and Empirical Studies, edited by Juan Carmona-Zabala, Rethymno: Institute of Mediterranean Studies - IMS, 367-398, 2023. The Greek government identified three potential solutions in order to restore Greek exports and finance its ambitious economic reforms after WW2. First, it focused on reestablishing the links between its tobacco sector and the international tobacco industries. Second, it complemented the income of the tobacco producers by establishing a new state organization; the National Tobacco Organization (Ethnikos Organismos Kapnou, EOK in its Greek acronym). Third, it encouraged the cultivation of other products which could be exported more easily.5 In this article, I focus on the first and second solutions, and examine the configuration of social forces that informed the establishment of EOK and the emergence of an elaborate apparatus of policies that supported the income of tobacco producers. Furthermore, I argue that, in the Greek context, such extensive and costly redistributive policies were extremely unusual in the conjuncture of the 1950s and 1960s.