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The rural area of El Tigre, a city in the eastern state of Azoátegui, in Venezuela, looks like an anthill made of two nations of ants: Spanish mixed with Portuguese. Since 2009, when an international pact between Brazil and Venezuela started being implemented and allowed the creation of a company destined to the culture and harvest of agricultural products, dozens of Brazilian workers arrived to help on the project’s development.

The name of the initiative is Socialist Project José Inácio de Abreu e Lima. Its name is a homage to a Brazilian general who fought side by side with Simón Bolívar in the battle for Venezuelan independence. A state property, it seeks to function as the area’s center of production and distribution. Linked with the local farmers through the support of their activities and the purchase of their products, Abreu e Lima aims at reinforcing the national production of soy and corn.

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This year, the company will expand its land to 49 thousand acres, jumping to 25,000 next year, obtaining as much  as 271,000 in 2019. “We got, so far, to 20% of our goal”, says Yhonny Zabaleta, the company’s vice-president. “But the growth is accelerated, last year our productive area was only 9,000 acres. But we already started selling soy and corn to the whole country.”

The company has a sophisticated industrial structure to carry out its economic mission. It has four granaries, each with a 10,000 grain capacity, and six more are being built. The industrial process is mechanized and controlled by computers. An industry that refines and packs oil, meat, milk and soy milk is being built.

According the president of Abreu e Lima, Alfredo Herrera, the annual consumption of soy is 1.2 million tons, and almost all of it is imported. “If you don’t have soy, you don’t develop cattle breeding, egg production, fish farming, because soy is the cheapest source of protein”, says the director. “But nowadays our production doesn’t reach 100,000 tons, when the soybean oil consumption is 1.5 liter per inhabitant.”

Dependency

Initiatives like Abreu e Lima are part of an effort to invert one of the consequences stemming from the economic model that was consolidated in Venezuela during the XX century. Benefiting from oil money, the country exchanged its agricultural basis and its industrial perspective for the foreign trade resources.

Venezuela, by the end of the 19th century, was the third biggest world coffee exporter, only behind Brazil and the Dutch islands. But the conveniences of oil income made the state and the country’s capitals focus on that largely lucrative branch, and agriculture was left behind. At the begging of Chávez’s government, the country imported 70% of its food and the rural activity didn’t represent 5% of the PIB.

“We can say we had an economy based on port agriculture”, explains Javier Alejandro Ramos, vice-minister of Agriculture. “All the food that came into the country was imported. We even imported canned beans”. With no technical assistance, financing, machines or any sort of incentive, the rural production became one of subsistence; only a few areas had meaningful production. “It was cheaper to buy foreign food”, says Ramos.

The government decided to face this historical setback through a set of measures listed in the Law of Land and Agricultural Development, approved during the end of 2001, which sets the parameters of land reform. The new law forbade one person to possess more than 12,000 acres, established progressive taxes over properties, created mechanisms for the expropriation of unproductive agricultural states and determined the recovery of public areas that were illegally occupied.

“The four main pillars of our political plan are land distribution, financing for agriculture, technical assistance and food distribution”, says the vice-minister. “Self-sufficiency is a fundamental goal of our revolution.”

In the last thirteen years, more than 16 million acres were put into shape and distributed between 168 thousand families. The banks, both public and private, were forced to offer a line of credit to finance countrymen. The financial funds that came from oil money made feasible school feeding programs and assisted distribution of food in the cities, compulsorily supplied by the land reform properties.

According to Ministry of Agriculture’s figures, the Agricultural Bank of Venezuela loaned the rural producers 1.22 billion Venezuelan bolivars in 2010, 6.352% more than in 2006. Since the creation of the Socialist Agricultural Development Fund (Fondas), in 2008, more than 3.7 billion bolivars were loaned to the country’s agriculturists.

The private lands that were productive weren’t touched by the expropriations, but the State became the greatest vector of agriculture.

Agro-industry corporations

Even though food imports are still close to 70% of the total, government authorities consider that there have been structural improvements in the rural situation. The caloric consumption per inhabitant rose from 2,200 calories in 1998 to 3,200 in 2011, without foreign purchases rising. The national meat production, for instance, already takes care of 78% of the national demand.  The rice production takes care of 96%, the milk production, 64%.

The government’s strategy allies the enlargement of family farming with big state corporations.  These companies, besides having their own production, buy the production of the small farmers and the local cooperatives, and also offer credit and assistance.

Moreover, they distribute food in the cities, both through private chains of supermarkets and through Mercal, the chain that is controlled by the government and works with subsidized pricing.  A lot of these projects can count on the support and partnership of PDVAL, the agricultural arm of the gigantic state oil company, which sets aside part of its gains to land reform programs.

Agro-industry state companies like these, that link the regional production and the national market, seem to be a large part of Chávez’s plan. Several of them, in different branches, proliferate in different states, such as Los Anges, that bottles milk, juice and water, Café Fama da América, Café Venezuela and Caco Odari, that produces chocolates.

The social function of these companies is determined from its statutes. “Abreu and Lima is obligated to support the communities that surround it, in an area of 11 miles around the industrial area”, explains Pedro Orellana, coordinator of  Communitarian Management.  “There are 711 small and medium producers benefited by the company, in 19 Indian and Creole communities”.

According to official data, the food production in Venezuela increased 8% between 1988 and 1998, from 15.9 million tons annually to 17.1 million. In 2010, this volume rose to 25 million tons, representing a 44% increase in the national agriculture production in Chávez’s era.

Truth is that Venezuelans started eating more and putting more national food on their plates, though they are still far from overcoming the dependency on foreign markets.

Translation: Kelly Cristina Spinelli 

Dois artefatos bélicos da época da Segunda Guerra Mundial foram encontrados dentro do Parque Arqueológico Vale dos Templos, atração turística que reúne diversas construções da época da colonização grega na Sicília.

Os objetos estavam a cerca de 150 metros do Templo de Hera, chamado de Juno pelos romanos, e foram descobertos por funcionários de uma empresa de jardinagem que faziam trabalhos de manutenção no terreno.

A área foi isolada pela Arma dos Carabineiros, que avisou um esquadrão antibombas para preparar a remoção dos artefatos. 

O Vale dos Templos é uma das atrações mais populares da Sicília e recebe milhares de visitantes todos os anos.

(*) Com Ansa