I n pursuit of the foregoing objective, different colonizing families were brought together on the plain. They were chosen by “The Commission for Migration and Internal Colonization,” based on their ability to cultivate land and for engaging in specialized agricultural production such as castor oil, cotton, and soy beans. These people, coming from Polesine, from Sicily, and other regions, were supposed therefore to work on the newly reclaimed lands and bring about the agricultural transformation of the region whose main source of wealth would be in agriculture and in processing its products.

To give greater impetus to the area, the fascist government recognized the need to give administrative independence to the new village. By a law of April 8, 1935, the community of S. Eufemia Lamezia was thus emphatically constituted. The cultivation of rice and beet-root, and the establishment of a sugar refinery were a consequence of an attempt to weave together industry and agriculture, thereby generating the growth necessary for the economic independence of the whole area. Sugar refining, which from an entrepreneurial point of view was a technical innovation, came into being in 1941.

Beet root production and the laboratory in the Background (S. Eufemia 1948) Storicitta Collection

"Business and trade resulted in the refining of all the sugar beets that were introduced and then cultivated in large scale on the reclaimed lands. In that first year, S. Eufemia’s sugar industry was able to produce 23,000 quintali (about 12,500 metric tons) of refined sugar” (Bevilacqua, pp. 284-85) Sugar refining continued even after the war until 1961, when despite popular pressure and parliamentary inquiries the sugar refinery ceased operating definitively.

(G. MASI, in “A proposal for restoring the industrial area of the former sugar refinery of S. Eufemia,” pp. 15-16, supplement of the Corriere Calabrese, year V, . 1/1996, edited by A. Bagnato, V. Fittante, G. Masi, A. Panzarella, V. Villella)