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Chavez’s Agrarian Land Reform: More like Lincoln than Lenin

By Seth R. DeLong, Ph.D.
Council on Hemispheric Affairs
March 1, 2005
Page 2

Upping the Ante
Last month, the president of INTI, Eliecer Otaiza, said that "We hope to issue 100,000 land grants within the next six months." This announcement followed a series of new decrees issued by the government intended to speed up the reform. However, since where the land will come from for the proposed grants is not clear, hostility has ignited between ranch owners and campesinos as the government begins inspecting which private estates it might appropriate. According to Juan Forero of the New York Times, even before these latest decrees were passed, "as Mr. Chavez’s government trains its sights on 6.6 million acres of private holdings, farmers are increasingly worried that it will recklessly seize private property." The government has recently set up an "Intervention Commission" to determine what lands are productive and were obtained legally. Last January, this commission began exercising its mandate under the INTI by inspecting the British-owned Vestey cattle ranch of El Charcote in Cojedes. In two months, the commission is due to announce its findings pertaining to the ranch’s proprietorship and productivity.

The Right Throws a Fit
The prospect of Chavez’s "revolutionary" government supporting hundreds of thousands of machete-wielding campesinos as they shout "fuera los ingleses" (out with the English) has provoked a spate of somewhat hysterical editorials by conservative Caracas and U.S. commentators. Frequently, much of what is written in the U.S. press on the subject is simply inaccurate or egregious hyperbole, which eventually gets passed off as gospel. For example, though the New York Times got it right, the Christian Science Monitor wrote in an editorial that "The plan supposedly applies to both private and governmental agricultural holdings, but so far only private lands are being targeted." While that statement is demonstrably false, the Washington Post --ominously reminding its readers that Chavez is a "disciple of Castro" --noted that the "assault on private property is merely the latest step in what has been a rapidly escalating ‘revolution’ by Venezuela's president that is undermining the foundations of democracy and free enterprise." Carlos Ball of the CATO Institute flatly declares in his piece, "Chavez’s Land Grab," that in the Bolivarian Republic, "Private property is history." Even though, as of today, no privately owned land has yet been redistributed to the landless poor by the government, the rightwing and its media lapdogs seem mighty nervous over any possible change in the status quo of Venezuela’s landed elite. But before dismissing Chavez as another Castro, it would behoove one to analyze the Venezuelan land barons and the history of agriculture in the country, at least since the oil boom, in order to determine just how radical the president’s land reform plan really is.

A Brief History of Venezuela’s Spectacular Iniquities
In Venezuela roughly 75 to 80% of the country’s private land is owned by 5% of all landowners. Regarding agricultural holdings, that figure drops to a mere 2% of the population owning 60% of the country’s farmland, much of which is fallow. Because these stark statistics do not help one understand the extraordinary levels of both rural and urban inequality in Venezuela, perhaps the following analogy will. Imagine if in the U.S. a handful of families owned the entire state of California. There is no California Coastal Commission, no limits on the amount of land that may be purchased, no zoning laws, no government oversight of any kind, nothing of the sort. But none of this really matters to the average citizen because California, as a conglomeration of large, privately owned estates, will never be seen by most U.S. residents (excepting itinerant laborers). In other words, try to think of one of the most beautiful states in the U.S. as a giant gated community. Meanwhile, the country’s landed oligarchy owns the vast majority of the land, most of which lies fallow because they prefer to sit on it for the purpose of land speculation rather than use it for agricultural production. With most of its arable land unused, the U.S. is the only net importer of food on the continent and is forced to purchase more than two-thirds of its foodstuffs abroad. Though this analogy may help one to empathize with the land situation in Venezuela, it is still woefully inadequate for conveying an adequate grasp on the levels of inequality in that country, as California only makes up 4% of the U.S. land mass.

Venezuela and the "Dutch Disease"
Today, about 90% of Venezuela’s 25 million people live in urban areas. This gross imbalance between urban and rural populations is largely a result of the 1970s oil boom. Before that, about two-thirds of Venezuelans lived in rural areas. However, once the country became flush with petrodollars, a succession of middle-of-the-road governments began to neglect the countryside and focus its resources in the petro industry. This concentration led to a demographic surge from rural to urban areas as peasants left their traditional vocation for the lure of urban jobs. The dire consequence of this internal migration was to turn the country into a net food importer, the only one in South America. With campesinos fleeing from the country to the cities, Venezuela’s planners failed to provide for the labor required to build or even sustain its pre-1970s agricultural base.



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