By 1938 nearly two million acres (some 800,000 hectares) had been redistributed within Ukrainian-inhabited areas. The redistribution did not necessarily help the local Ukrainian population, however. For instance, as early as 1920, 39 percent of the newly allotted land in Volhynia and Polissia (771,000 acres hectares) had been awarded as political patronage to veterans of Poland's 'war for independence,' and in eastern Galicia much land (494,000 acres hectares) had been given to land-hungry Polish peasants from the western provinces of the country. This meant that by the 1930s the number of Poles living within contiguous Ukrainian ethnographic territory had increased by about 300,000.