For many months the agriculture sector had been in recession due to bad harvests and cheap imports. The law as it stood was considered by many to unfairly favour landowners over struggling tenant farmers, leading to landowners evicting "unprofitable" tenant farmers and turning the land over to grazing. The traditionally somewhat conservative tenant farmers were becoming desperate for relief and willing to listen to aggressive nationalists who linked economic with political oppression in their messages and raised the question of who morally owned the land.