Small farming units that had resulted from the agricultural reforms of 1871 were not suited to the cultivation techniques of the larger estates,

which were necessary to obtain substantial profits, as for instance was the case with grain. On the contrary, the smaller farms took to intensive cultivation of products such as raisins and olive oil. That is, each farmer's stremmata (1 stremma = 0.10 hectares) of vines or olive trees demanded a long period of intensive and arduous labour, but brought about considerable profit. Thus the rural household ensured its survival with only a small amount of land.

The area of northern and western Peloponnese yielded raisins of good quality, which were particularly competitive in the world market. In this period, raisins were one of the country's basic exports and constituted a regulatory factor in the balance of foreign transactions and the influx of exchange. The raisins of the Peloponese were in great demand in Great Britain.

Phylloxera, a plant disease that had struck the French vines in the late nineteenth century, enormously increased the demand for Peloponnesian raisins as French viticulturists made up for their losses with Greek grapes. In the 1880s and 1890s the production of raisins increased rapidly to cover the French demand, while at the same time the price also increased. However, from the mid-1890s onwards French production resumed its initial levels and the demand for Greek raisins fell as rapidly as it had risen a few years earlier.

Thus, in the late 1890s and the early 1900s a crisis of overproduction of raisins occurred, where a large part of the production remained unsold, whereas the small quantiy absorbed by the market had a very low price.

This problem has been termed the raisin issue. Initially the government took the measure of withholding 15% of the production in order to keep exports at a low level. However the crisis was not resolved, probably because the withheld product, instead of being dealt with by the state (in order, for instance, to produce alcohol), was illegally exported. In 1899 the crisis worsened and the government of Georgios Theotokis attempted to establish a raisin bank with the intention of offering loans to producers and managing the quantity of raisins produced. Neither of these measures was successful.

In 1903 a group of foreign businessmen proposed the purchase of raisins on a monopoly basis, for a period of twenty years. This development was favourably accepted by raisin producers, in the hope that they would be rid of the problems of marketing and the involvement of middlemen financiers. This plan did not materialize either, because the monopoly idea was not favoured either by the Greek or the British governments. The failure of this project caused much unrest in the northern and western Peloponnese, and in certain cases verged on armed insurgence in which socialist and anarchist groups took a leading part. The whole affair led to the downfall of the Theotokis government in June of that same year. When later, in December 1903, Theotokis resumed authority as Prime Minister he reactivated the raisin bank in order to absorb part of the overproduction in the form of a tax in kind, and tried to discourage any expansion of raisin cultivation. A solution to the whole issue began to come to light when a large number of raisin producers was absorbed into the emmigration movement to America.