On 5/17/07, Louis Proyect <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Yoshie wrote:
>Iran demonstrates that an oil exporter can achieve food self
>sufficiency in key staples if the government tries (see below), but
>Venezuela's agricultural labor force as percentage of the total labor
>force was 6.9% in 2004 (16.8% in 1978), whereas Iran's is 24.7% in the
>same year (40.7% in 1978), so Venezuela may be too far gone to aim to
>reduce food import.
It is meretricious in the extreme to compare Venezuela and Iran, as I
have already pointed out.
Regarding comparison of Iran and Venezuela, Hugo Chavez doesn't agree
with you, nor would researchers who do comparative work on political
economy (it's hard to find any other pair of countries whose assets
are more similar to each other than Iran and Venezuela). See Greg
Wilpert's 2005 report on Venezuela's land reform below -- many of the
problems identified in it have not been effectively addressed. What
Venezuela can learn from Iran includes infrastructure investment and
support programs (ranging from education, research, credit, insurance,
distribution of seeds, guaranteed prices, etc. -- see
<ftp://ftp.fao.org/docrep/fao/meeting/010/ag355e.pdf>), without which
land reforms are not as effective as they can be. I'm sure Chavez and
his comrades are open to learning from other countries' experiences.
<http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/articles.php?artno=1529>
Venezuela's Land Reform
Land for People not for Profit in Venezuela
Tuesday, Aug 23, 2005
By: Gregory Wilpert – Venezuelanalysis.com
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Problems with the Land Reform
Despite the advances that have been made with the land reform,
relative to the enormous expectation raised by Chavez's "Bolivarian
Revolution," and based on the country's past experiences with the
issue and relative to experiences in other countries, Venezuela's
peasants are quite frustrated. There are at least five
problem-complexes that are the cause of this frustration and are
hindering the land reform process in Venezuela. One can summarize
these problems as involving the legal framework, general insecurity
and impunity, weak peasant organization, poor infrastructure and
support, and economic problems.
Weak legal framework
The combination of legal challenges to land redistribution and the
poor quality of Venezuela's land title registry has made the
expropriation and redistribution of privately held land extremely
difficult and slow. This situation has also affected the
redistribution of publicly held land because in many cases large
landowners claim to own lands that the Venezuelan state also claims to
own. Even though the government has been relatively rapid with the
handing out of land use rights, many feel these are legally
insufficient. Recent high-profile efforts to take over land that the
state considers to be illegally held (such as the Hatos Piñero and El
Charcote), moved the issue of the legality of privately held land to
the front burner for a while, but once press attention died down, the
effort to resolve these land dispute cases seemed to die down too.
This lack of ocupación previa is also a critical weakness in the legal
framework for the land reform.
General lawlessness and impunity
Further complicating the land reform is the relatively lawless,
insecure, and chaotic situation in Venezuela's countryside. Peasants
not only have to deal with ruthless landowners who are intent on
maintaining control over their latifundios, often with use of hired
assassins and bullies, they also have to deal with drug smugglers,
irregular military forces (such as Colombia's paramilitary group and
an emerging Venezuelan paramilitary counter-part), and corrupt
Venezuelan police and military forces.
Even though the peasant group CANEZ has tried to call attention to the
more than 130 assassinations of peasant leaders, their efforts have
had little success, and the government has been very slow to deal with
the problem. Only in July 2005, for the first time, did CANEZ and
another organzation, the Frente Ezequiel Zamora, organize a protest in
Caracas to demand government action. The National Assembly finally
responded shortly after the protest and formed a commission to
investigate the assassinations.
Weak peasant organization
Complicating things further is the fact that Venezuela's peasant
organizations are very weak, in part because the history of a
collapsing agricultural economy due to Dutch Disease. This means that
even though they have a sympathetic government, they are not in a
position to exert pressure on the government so that it makes sure the
land reform is fully implemented. If Venezuela had stronger peasant
organizations they could probably accomplish much in terms of social
oversight over the land reform process. Also, more pressure would
probably mean stronger law enforcement when it comes to investigating
and prosecuting those responsible for the 130 assassinations of
peasant leaders.
A result of the weak level peasant organization is that many of those
who would benefit from the land reform lack either the knowledge or
the resources to claim their rights. This, in turn, makes them less
likely to organize politically. However, when they do organize, many
times these organizations are drawn into the orbit of one political
faction or another, making it difficult for the groups to work
together.
Poor infrastructure and support
While much land has been titled in a relatively short time span, the
land reform support agencies, that is, the National Rural Development
Institute (INDER) and the Venezuelan Agrarian Corporation (CVA), have
not been as active in supporting the land reform as they should be.
One reason for this is that most government functionaries are still
left over from pre-Chavez governments, and a great many belong to
political factions that oppose the Bolivarian Revolution and the land
reform.
For example, seven months after the opening of a showcase project in
Chavez's home state of Barinas in 2003, not much had happened, reports
Maurice Lemoine in Le Monde Diplomatique:
"Our comandante [Chavez] thinks everything's working great! They hide
the real figures from him; no one tells him the truth. There haven't
been 500 hectares opened up for farming here, only 15." The Ministry
of Infrastructure (MINFRA) should have cleared 400 hectares for
planting by now. It hasn't. Despite repeated demands, officials from
the Rural Development Institute, responsible for drainage and
irrigation, haven't appeared. Those from the environment ministry have
been conspicuously absent too. "The state institutions won't see me,"
complains Richard Vivas, a leader of the cooperative, "only the INTI
supports me."[12]
In other words, while the INDER is supposed to provide training,
technology, and credit to land reform beneficiaries, it has been
extremely slow to do so. Other reasons for this appear to be related
to problems of corruption within the institute and another reason is
that the central government has paid relatively little attention to
infrastructure and support side of the land reform, in favor of the
more controversial and visible land redistribution aspect. The CVA,
which is supposed to help peasants market their new agricultural
products, has not even really gotten off the ground yet, over three
years after the official launch of the land reform program.
Another problem related to the poor governmental support is that even
though the banks are required to dedicate a certain percentage of
their loans to the agricultural sector, most of these loans do not
reach the small farmers, but mainly large farmers. Also, when they do
reach small farmers, all too often they reach them too late, so that
they miss opportunities to purchase and plant seeds for the planting
season.
Economic problems
Even once peasants acquire land, training, technology, and
infrastructure such as access roads, and credit, they still face the
next large hurdle, which is marketing their agricultural products.
Even though the government has set up the CVA, there is no guarantee
that the CVA will buy or sell the products. Venezuela has historically
faced the problem, mentioned in the beginning, that the country's
dominant oil industry, because of the large inflows of foreign
currency, tends to drive up cheap imports and in the end makes
domestically produced products uncompetitive. Unless the government
subsidizes Venezuelan agricultural products and/or protects them
against imports, it is unlikely that these products can be sold at a
good price on either domestic or international markets.
This economic "Dutch Disease," is precisely what caused Venezuelan
agriculture to decline to only 5% of GDP by 1998, and it seems that no
government, including the Chavez government, has found a solution to
this problem. Despite the Chavez government's efforts to diversify the
economy by providing credit to small and medium industries, by
favoring them in the state's purchasing programs (which are relatively
large), and by supporting them in a with a variety of other measures,
none of these measures addresses the problem that production prices in
Venezuela are too high because the huge revenues coming in from the
oil industry overvalue the Venezuelan currency. The recent oil price
boom, which caused oil prices to almost quadruple during Chavez's
presidency (from $10 per barrel in 1998 to $40 per barrel of
Venezuelan crude in 2005) has only exacerbated the problem.
The government's currency control, which keeps the currency at a
relatively high and steady level, while also restricting capital
flight, exacerbates the problems of the Dutch Disease, in that it
makes imports relatively cheap (thereby controlling inflation) and
exports relatively expensive. The currency controls, though, appear to
be necessary in order to control inflation and capital flight. The
Chavez government has publicly stated, though, that most agricultural
production should be oriented toward suppling the domestic market, so
as to make Venezuela a country that enjoys food sovereignty, a goal
from which it is still far removed, since it imports about 75% of all
food products it consumes. It might make sense, thus, if the focus is
on ensuring that Venezuelans consume domestically produced food
products whenever they are available by imposing import tariffs on
competing imported goods. So far it is unclear, though, whether the
government is pursuing such a strategy.
The international farmer and peasant movement, the Via Campesina,[13]
which is advising the Chavez government, has proposed that the
Venezuelan government phase out food imports at a rate of 5-10% per
year, with a corresponding plan developed with Venezuelan peasant
organizations to receive the credit, land and other services and
inputs needed to make up the deficit each year.
--
Yoshie
