More than 1 Million Venezuelans Benefit from Land Reform Program

[Peace Patriot]

More than 1 Million Venezuelans Benefit from Land Reform Program

By CORREO DEL ORINOCO INTERNATIONAL 4/20/2012

The President of Venezuela’s National Land Institute (INTI), Luis Motta Dominguez, affirmed that more than 224,000 families have benefited from redistributed farmlands made available through the Chavez administration’s agrarian reform program.

The announcement was made during an interview with state television on Tuesday when Motta gave an update on the progress being made with respect to the country’s land redistribution program.

“It we take an average of 5 people per family, then we’re talking about 1.3 million people who have benefited from the redistribution”, the INTI President said while interviewed on the program Toda Venezuela (All of Venezuela).

Venezuela’s agrarian reform began in November 2001 when President Hugo Chavez signed by decree the Land Law, mandating the break up of fallow landed estates, known in Spanish as latifundios. The law gives the state the legal authority to expropriate any lands underutilized or illegally acquired and redistribute them to farming collectives comprised of wage workers previously without access to their own parcels.

According to Motta, INTI has been able to regularize some 7.7 million hectares (19 million acres) of land over the past 11 years and redistribute some 1.1 million (2.7 million) of those to rural laborers involved in state projects.

“The expropriation of these lands happens when there is a latifundio. We need to act so that these lands that were once concentrated in the hands of a single person and weren’t being used are handed over to the small producer”, the Land Institute President declared.

In addition to providing land and meaningful work to rural laborers, Venezuela’s land redistribution program is also designed to help decrease the country’s reliance on imported food items, a historical problem in the OPEC member state.

This is done, Motta informed, by turning the once underutilized lands into productive tracts in line with the country’s needs.

“All those lands that are not productive are being rescued. They’re being handed over to collectives or to agro-ecological projects in order to consolidate the food security and development. There is a constant monitoring and we’ve seen how production has increased throughout the national territory”, he said on Tuesday.

Recently, the government introduced a new program, Mission AgroVenezuela, with a similar goal - to stimulate agricultural production by providing assistance to any farmer willing to dedicate their land to domestic production.

The assistance comes in the form of low-interest credits through state financing as well as access to technical aid, supplies and farming machinery such as tractors and harvesters.

These initiatives along with continual evaluation and rescue of fallow lands have led, Motta argued, to greater work opportunities and higher living standards for Venezuela’s small farmers.

http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/6938

(Creative Commons license.)

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I don't know the stats (and the article does not provide them) on Venezuela's increased food production and reduction of food imports, but the Chavez government certainly has the right idea. Small farmers are the backbone of food security.

Helping small farmers has many other benefits as well, including rural employment--a way to reverse the "neo-liberal"/corporate trend of driving small farmers into urban squalor, where they suffer dire poverty, can't feed their families and become a slave labor pool for local fascists and transglobal corporations--a phenomenon most evident, currently, in U.S. dominated Colombia, where 5 MILLION small farmers have been brutally driven from their lands by state terror, using the U.S. "war on drugs" as the excuse and billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars in military aid.

It was an absurd and suicidal policy of previous "neo-liberal" Venezuelan governments to allow millions of hectares of fallow land to be held, often in absentia, by distant landowners who did nothing with the land. Land often initially stolen from Indigenous farmers was allowed to lay fallow while Indigenous and other small farmers starved and were forced to migrate (or sometimes became extremely poor and oppressed farm workers if the land was even used to produce food). The Chavez government, early on, weighed in on the side of those dispossessed of their lands, and began a big, systematic program of researching and regularizing land titles and requiring that land be used for food production.

Their land reform program is one of the best--likely THE best--in Latin America, because it not only involves restoring farm land to farmers, and not only requires food production (for five years) before the family or collective can own the land, but it also includes active government help on technical agriculture issues, establishing markets, farmer education and equipment. Prior Venezuelan governments promised land reform but without the requirement of food production and the assistance to farmers. In "neo-liberal" hands it became just a corrupt land giveaway.

I should add--since the subject interests me and it is important to human survival--that the Chavez government is investing in conversion to organic farming (often the preference of small farmers anyway, among other reasons to avoid pesticide poisoning of their families). Altogether, the Chavez government's land reform program is a laudable one, undertaken peacefully and legally with a minimum of land disputes and with a great deal of forethought.

[Bacchus4.0]

1. I believe that is Eva Gollinger's rag. its government funded

and, as we have seen, the land reforms haven't resulted in increased food production.

[ocpagu]

3. I don't believe increasing food production should be the focus of land reform.

Reducing poverty should be. Making unused lands become productive, fixating poor families in the countryside - thus avoiding rural flight and the growing of urban slums - is a way of contributing to social equality.

[Peace Patriot]

5. I'll take Evo Golinger over the New York Slimes, et al, any day.

"I believe that is Eva Gollinger's* rag. its government funded" --Bacchus4.0

*(One "l" in Golinger.)
--------------------

So what? I don't at all mind reading the Venezuelan government's side of things, given the egregious propaganda we get from the Corporate Press.

And the United Nations...

U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization says Venezuela Prepared for World Food Crisis

"Mérida, February 27th 2009 (Venezuelanalysis.com) -- The representative of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in Venezuela, Francisco Arias Milla, said the Venezuelan government’s investment in domestic food production and regional food security will strengthen its ability and that of its neighbors to withstand the worsening global food crisis." (MORE)
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x5163276

...and the Council on Hemispheric Affairs (COHA)...

"Venezuela's Agrarian Land Reform: More like Lincoln than Lenin
By SETH DELONG - COHA, February 25th 2005"
(superb analysis of the Chavez government's land reform and food program)
http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/963

...and Oxfam and the UN Economic Commission on Latin America and the Caribbean...

Venezuela: Latin America’s inequality success story
http://www.oxfamblogs.org/fp2p/?p=3016

My struggle for REAL information about Venezuela began with reading of Chavez's several big electoral victories in the Corporate Press with NO--zero, zilch--information provided on WHY Chavez was so popular.

What's wrong with this picture?

I then looked into the details of Venezuela's election system (a subject--election systems--that I knew quite a bit about from studying our own rotten-to-the-core system) and found that Venezuela's system had not only been certified as honest and aboveboard by the Carter Center and every other reputable election monitoring group on earth, but it is honest and aboveboard on the face of the facts.

That's something else we learned NOTHING ABOUT from the Corporate Press, which was busy covering up the fatal deficiencies in our system.

Honestly elected and re-elected by big majorities and no clue as to WHY.

The lesson? Don't expect REAL information about Venezuela from the Corporate Press. Look elsewhere, find alternative sources, make judgements on the reliability of sources, try to fill in the 'black holes' in Corporate Press articles where information should be. It is unfortunate that there is NOT A SINGLE RELIABLE SOURCE of information about Venezuela in the entirety of the Corporate Press, including the BBC and such flabby-brained "liberal" journals as the Christian Science Monitor. Trying to find objective information on Venezuela from our "usual sources" is like walking in the Sahara Desert without water. There is NO dialogue--no pro- and con---in the Corporate Press, even on the editorial/column pages. The so-called 'news' articles are laughable in their obvious prejudice and dirty little 'journalistic' tricks to turn every story against Chavez and his government.

So, pardon me for trying to be well-informed on Venezuela by reading some sympathetic sources which often provide volumes of facts and analysis to back up their perspective, while the Corporate Press kills us with thirst for real information. You can go ahead and walk in that desert. I refuse to.

[Bacchus4.0]

6. you can have her!! n/t

v

[naaman fletcher]

7. I'm all for land reform

I think in general it needs to be a "one-off" deal, or else it creates to much incentive for corruption on the part of the government, but again, I am all for it as it's not like most of these estates were acquired through fair and free markets anyway.

That being said, food imports have not decreased despite this, most likely due to the price controls which don't create enough incentive for these new small landowners to produce more than they can eat themselves.

[xchrom]

2. Du rec. Nt

[Judi Lynn]

4. Terrific article, helpful comments. Rec. n/t

[Judi Lynn]

8. Kicking.