[Scpg] Venezuela: progressive govt promoting sustainable smallholder agriculture as antidote to globalized agribusiness

[Faramarz Nabavi]

The Greening of Venezuela
Wednesday, Jul 28, 2004
By: David Raby

With all the hullabaloo about Chavez alleged authoritarianism, opposition
strikes and demonstrations, and a possible recall referendum, you could be
forgiven for thinking that nothing constructive is being done in Venezuela
and that the nations energies are entirely absorbed by political
mud-slinging. Indeed, thats just what the corporate media would like you
to think.

But go to alternative websites like Znet, Venezuelanalysis.com or
Rebelion, and youll find reports on literacy campaigns, health clinics in
poor neighbourhoods staffed by Cuban doctors, community-based housing
programmes and agrarian reform. Venezuela is undergoing a social
transformation the likes of which have not been seen in Latin America
since the early years of the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua.

Agrarian cooperatives

In the past fifteen months the government has begun to redistribute
uncultivated land from private estates or public lands to poor peasants
and landless labourers. In a repeat of the agrarian reform programmes
carried out decades ago in several Latin American countries, some 2.2
million hectares (5.5 million acres) has already been distributed to
116,000 families organised in cooperatives.

This alone would be remarkable in todays globalised world, where the very
idea of cooperative or collective agriculture has been dismissed as
outdated and inefficient, and countries like Mexico have dismantled
long-established rural cooperatives and opened their agricultural sectors
to the unfettered play of the free market and the consequent domination of
private agribusiness.

But the Venezuelan agrarian reform goes beyond satisfying peasant land
hunger and alleviating poverty. It is based as far as possible on organic
practices and is intended as the foundation stone of an entirely new
social and economic model, oriented towards self-sufficiency,
sustainability and endogenous development.

Fighting bureaucracy

Chaguaramal is a newly-cultivated strip of land surrounded by isolated
poverty-stricken communities, a few kilometres inland from the Caribbean.
Here 144 families have so far benefited from the creation of a SARAO or
Self-Organised Rural Association. The Ministry of Planning and Development
first provided land, funds and equipment, and people from nearby villages
began to organise the new community on a cooperative basis.

But at first the Ministry delegated implementation of the project to a
bureaucratic public corporation, CORPOCENTRO, which imposed technical
decisions without consultation. Only in August 2003, when the INTI
(National Land Institute) took over responsibility for projects of this
type, did Chaguaramal take on the characteristics of community
self-organisation as originally intended. We listen to the communities, we
open our doors to them so that they can bring to life their own projects
and dreams, says Silvia Vidal, the INTI official now responsible for the
SARAOS.

The new settlement (asentamiento) consists of attractive houses built by
the residents themselves with materials and technical assistance provided
by the State, with carefully cultivated gardens, a school, a health centre
and a child care centre. A variety of crops are being produced as well as
livestock and fish, and we were treated to a delicious fish barbecue. We
saw how the community prepares its own compost and is already recycling
most of its waste.

Im a member of the SARAO, I joined on 15 April 2002", says Gelipsa Rojas.
My area of work is worm composting, which will give us organic
fertiliser...so as not to use chemical fertilisers...

At first [under CORPOCENTRO] they only paid attention to the men, we women
stayed at home and only did housework. When the INTI arrived, things
changed. There is still machismo but we are gradually getting rid of it.
This worm-compost project is run only by women. Now the men help with the
housework, were both responsible for it...

Chaguaramal is in Miranda State, with a Governor ferociously opposed to
Chavez and the revolutionary process, and so everything achieved in the
new settlement has been done despite systematic obstructionism by the
State government. In a neighbouring hamlet called Buenos Aires which was
not initially included in the project, opposition politicians turned
people against the cooperative, saying that it would do nothing for them
and would be run on principles of Cuban slavery. But now several families
from Buenos Aires have been incorporated into the SARAO and everyone can
see its benefits.

Developing the interior

Hundreds of kilometres away, over the coastal mountains and in the llanos,
the sweltering tropical plains of the interior, we visited a major
development project which reflects the Chavez governments aim of moving
people and resources away from the coastal cities. The Ezequiel Zamora
Agro-Industrial Sugar Complex (CAAEZ) is centred around a state-of-the-art
sugar mill now under construction with Cuban technicians and Brazilian
equipment, a reflection of the desire for Latin American collaboration.
The complex and its associated agricultural cooperatives will produce not
only sugar but rice, yucca and other crops in order to promote
agricultural self-sufficiency (Venezuela, chronically dependent on oil,
imports 70% of its food despite having abundant fertile land).

As long ago as 1975 this area was designated as ideal for sugar production
- cane yields here are several times higher than in Cuba or Brazil - and a
first-class irrigation system was built but then abandoned due to
corruption under previous governments. Then in the 1990s a Costa Rican
investor offered to go into partnership with local farmers, making loans
for them to produce cane and promising to build a mill, only to abandon
the project and take the funds, leaving them in the lurch - I was one of
those who sowed cane and waited nine years for the first harvest, and was
unable to harvest the cane because of that gentleman... declared
Francisco, a member of one of the associated cooperatives, bitterly
denouncing this example of flight capital.

But now the CAAEZ project is well advanced: a huge undertaking which will
eventually employ 15,000 workers, it comprises the sugar mill and other
industrial plants as well as the agricultural area. Here too organic
methods will be favoured: among other things, sugar-cane bagasse will be
composted and supplied to mixed-farming cooperatives. All of the new
social programmes are also being implemented here, such as the literacy
programme (the Robinson Mission) and the Into the Neighbourhoods Mission
with its health clinics staffed by Cuban doctors.

The greening of Caracas

But the greening of Venezuela is not limited to the countryside: in the
heart of Caracas, just behind the Hilton Hotel, an abandoned strip of land
has been turned into an organopnico, an organic market garden for the
intensive production of lettuces, tomatoes and an impressive variety of
crops for the urban market. Unemployed people from nearby shanty-towns are
given work here and trained as agricultural specialists.

Urban agricultural plots like this are springing up in cities across
Venezuela and further contributing to the aim of self-sufficiency. When
the project began it was ridiculed by the esculido opposition, who said it
was impossible to produce food here, or that it would be uneconomic. But
now people from wealthy neighbourhoods themselves buy the produce when
they can get it (which is not easy since demand is so high).

A new socio-economic model

Agrarian reform, cooperative enterprise, organic agriculture, use of local
resources - these are all features of an entirely new socio-economic model
for Venezuela. The model is summed up in a programme called the Vuelvan
Caras Mission (a term almost impossible to translate), which attempts to
coordinate all the other programmes and missions: it provides government
assistance in the form of technical advice and funds derived from oil
income, for agricultural, industrial and commercial cooperatives,
generating employment and training. It encourages local initiative,
self-sufficiency, sustainability and endogenous development, development
from within and from below, with popular participation. The leading role
of women, blacks and indigenous people is also explicitly promoted.

This new model will take years to develop, but it is already under way and
being promoted with great enthusiasm. It does not exclude possible
nationalisation of some major industries, but it points in a direction
which challenges both globalised capitalism and state socialism of the
traditional variety. It is also the foundation of the Bolivarian
Alternative for the Americas (ALBA in its Spanish acronym), which
Venezuela is proposing as a progressive alternative to the ALCA (the
US-sponsored Free Trade Area of the Americas). This is why Washington
hates Chavez: not because of his revolutionary rhetoric, not because of
any threat to democracy, but because the Venezuelan process offers a real
alternative to US plans for the hemisphere.

David Raby is a research fellow at the University of Liverpool's Institute
of Latin American Studies.