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Venezuela: Co-operatives Turn Idle Landed Estates Green
By Humberto Márquez
Inter-Press Service
June 14, 2008

BARINAS, Venezuela - "As far as you can see, there was not one litre of milk produced, not even an ear of corn," says José Tapia Coirán, turning with his arms outstretched, pointing to the horizon of the Venezuelan savannah dotted by trees. "Now we produce 500 litres of milk per day and we harvested one million kilos of maize."

He is referring to the achievements of the Brisas del Masparro co-operative, set in the plains of Barinas, in southwest Venezuela. Coirán, as he is known by everyone, is a former day labourer and tractor driver for large farms in the area, and is now the co-operative's president.

"Once there was a forest here, but the large estate owners took all the lumber. They left a few trees and thousands of hectares of stubble that we are cleaning up little by little and planting with forage grass and maize," says Coirán, adding "they had abandoned this, left it lying fallow, and that is why we took it over."

He and his fellow co-operative members show this reporter vast stretches of plains that are as flat as a billiard table amidst weeds, a marsh here and there, pastures and fields being ploughed for planting, underscoring the co-operative's explanation that what they had occupied was unproductive land.

We come across flocks of herons, scarlet ibis, and some flickers. "We want to conserve all that we can. We decided not to take down any trees, but rather get rid of weeds and pests as we progress," says Miguel Méndez, another co-operative member.

President Hugo Chávez launched a "war" against large estates with a 2001 land act that laid the groundwork for a government "recovery" of rural land whose private ownership and productivity could not be proved. There continue to be clashes over land between large landowners and small farmers.

In 1999, large rural estates covered six million hectares in Venezuela. Two million hectares have been confiscated by the government, which handed over 60 percent of that to more than 100,000 rural families, according to official figures.

Furthermore, 98,500 farms that cover 4.3 million hectares have been regularised through the agrarian charter, which grants possession, but not ownership, of the land, which belongs to the government.

The Santa Rita "hacienda", or rural estate, on the banks of the Masparro river, extends across 31,000 hectares but has no more than 1,800 head of cattle, according to the co-operative. Peasant groups occupied it in 2002 and 2003, and the government assigned them some 16,000 hectares, leaving the rest to the former owners.

The co-operative that has made the most progress is Brisas del Masparro, with 56 members on 803 hectares. Five years ago they received a loan of 156,000 dollars that was invested in cattle, horses, equipment and inputs, and in the first crops.

They now have a double-purpose herd, for meat and milk, based on crosses between Cebú and Holstein breeds acclimated to the tropical plains.

COMMON PROPERTY

A large house once used as a bunkhouse for labourers and as a storage facility by the former estate has been turned into a community centre. The first impression is one of disorder. A pile of tractor parts in the yard marks the only point in the area where there is a signal for the satellite phone.

Pigs and chickens follow a young man as he rubs the kernels off corn cobs. Another man cleans the floor of the corridor, which is also the site of co-operative assemblies. It has been a while since the walls have received a fresh coat of paint.

In the back are a kitchen and a large dining table for those who are working on a given day and the families that have settled in improvised homes in the surrounding area. On one wall there are faded posters of Chávez and of the Salvadoran revolutionary Farabundo Martí (1893-1932).

"We are socialists. We work as a community, according to the abilities of each, and we take turns so that we aren't always doing the same thing, and to learn about everything. We realised that if we were each on our own it would be very difficult to get ahead and leave behind our days as labourers, as employees enriching someone else," says Neptalí Quintana, who for many years worked in artificial insemination of cows on the region's large ranches.

He is leaning against a fence of the dairy, where children are milking cows for the second time today. "We get about five litres of milk per animal per day -- above the average" in the area, which is less than four litres per cow, says Quintana.

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