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 | | From: | Alex | | Subject: | OT/ Land Reform In Venezuela | | Date: | Mon, 24 Jan 2005 03:15:10 +0100 |
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 | LAND REFORM IN VENEZUELA
http://www.venezuelaninformation.net/downloads/landreform.htm
Since the arrival of the Spanish in 1492, notes Braulio Alvarez,
long-time peasant activist and former director of Venezuela's
National Land Institute, "we have been struggling for equality,
justice, and an end to exploitation." Access to land rights is a
key component in this struggle for human dignity. Under the
government of President Hugo Chávez, peasants are recovering
not only their lands, but also their human rights and dignity.
The Venezuelan government has implemented policies that
recognize peasants' ancestral rights. Peasant struggles have
resulted in significant gains for equality and social justice.
A History of Inequality
Venezuela has had an extremely unbalanced land ownership
system, with 5 percent of the population owning three-quarters
of the agricultural land. This leaves most of the rural population
poor, landless, and unable to support themselves. Three-fifths of
agricultural laborers do not own any of the land they work.
Historically, land reform programs designed to address these
imbalances have often failed because they did little more than
give peasants land, without providing access to financial credit,
technical expertise, or marketing assistance, all of which are
necessary for success.
Rather than increasing Venezuela's ability to feed itself, programs
implemented in the 1960s with the support of the United States
and its "Alliance for Progress" only deepened the country's
economic dependence. Critics have viewed this as a flawed
development approach that industrialized agricultural production
and made it capital-intensive while failing to support the peasantry
with education and training. Rather than leading to a fairer distribution
of land, it resulted in peasants losing access to their lands.
The National Land Institute
In 1998, Venezuelans overwhelmingly elected Hugo Chavez to
the Presidency. A year later they approved a new constitution
addressing the rights of rural peasants to land and of citizens to
food security. To avoid the failures of previous agrarian reform
programs, Congress enacted the Law on Land and Agricultural
Development in November 2001. The law instituted a cap on
the size of landholdings, taxed land that was not in production,
and provided for the distribution of land to landless peasants.
Main goals of this legislation were to address issues of social
injustice and to increase agricultural production. This legislation
created three new institutions to carry out these goals: one to
administer land tenancy, a second to provide technical and
infrastructure aid, and a third to assist with marketing strategies.
The most significant of these institutions, created in January 2002,
is the National Land Institute (Instituto Nacional de Tierras, INTI).
Through such legislation, the Chávez government is demonstrating
the political will to bring about concrete, positive changes in the
countryside.
Food Sovereignty
In order to speed up the process of agrarian reform, on February 4,
2003 Hugo Chávez signed a presidential decree formally launching
Plan Zamora as part of the National Land Institute. The goal of the
program is to support sustainable agricultural development based on
a philosophy of a just distribution of land in accordance with values
of equality and social justice. Its main objective is to distribute land to
small and medium-sized producers. Plan Zamora is key to achieving
the government's goals of food security, economic self-sufficiency,
and breaking a dependency on imported goods.
The Venezuelan government named this land reform program after Ezequiel
Zamora, a revolutionary liberal leader from the nineteenth century who
advocated a far-reaching land reform program for the peasantry and
expressed an intense hostility to the land-owning oligarchy. Just as Chávez
has drawn on independence leader Simón Bolívar to inform the ideals of
the Bolivarian Revolution, Ezequiel Zamora's legacy emerges in Venezuela's
agrarian reform program.
Much of the land distributed under Plan Zamora was empty or already
owned by the government. The law also places a cap on the size of
private farms and allows for the expropriation of unused lands. Before
acquiring land, a participant needs to apply for a "carta agraria" (agrarian
deed) from the National Land Institute (INTI) that verifies qualifications
including demonstration of economic need and willingness to work an
assigned plot of land. With this deed, an applicant can occupy a plot
and receive preferential consideration from public financial institutions
for a low-interest loan to work the land. These cartas agrarias provide
temporary title to occupied land until the Venezuelan congress can draft
legislation to provide permanent title.
By the end of 2003, the government had signed 9,000 cartas agrarias
providing about 60,000 peasant families with more than 5.5 million
acres of land, far surpassing their target of 3.5 million acres. In
celebrating this success, INTI president Ricaurte Leonett noted,
"we can affirm with pride that the revolutionary process planted
in the countryside is bearing fruit." Among the benefits of the
program was helping to guarantee food security in Venezuela and
improving the lives of rural families. Leonett announced that the
government would conduct a national census to see how many
rural families lacked land and how much land that government
owned, so that the work of the land institute could continue.
This struggle for land rights has not been without its problems.
Conservative landholders, in alliance with traditional political
parties-which still exercise significant control in rural areas-feel
threatened by the actions of an increasingly mobilized rural
population. They are outraged by perceived threats to their
privileged position and what they view as an attack on
private property, and have responded viciously to the planned
reforms. In three years time, Braulio Alvarez notes, 150 rural
leaders have been killed. Although some of the perpetrators
of these crimes have been arrested, for the most part paramilitary
groups operate with an impunity that indicates the difficulties
that rural activists still need to overcome. The opposition's
strong influence on the court system has also reversed some
of the agrarian reform law's provisions and slowed distribution
of land. Low prices for agricultural commodities also frustrate
peasant attempts to earn a living selling their produce at market.
Return to Rural Development
In 1960, about two-thirds of Venezuela's six million people lived
in the countryside and worked in the agriculture sector. During the
oil boom in the 1970s, the government began to ignore rural areas
and focused its attention instead on urban and industrial sectors.
In response, peasants flooded into urban areas in search of jobs
and economic prosperity where they settled into "misery belts"
that surround Venezuela's cities. Unemployment, a lack of utilities
such as water and electricity, and high crime rates plague these
slums. Forty years later, 87 percent of the country's 25 million
people live in cities. Not only did this policy leave the countryside
underdeveloped, but it also increased problems in urban areas.
A legacy of this history of unequal development is that most of the
country's resources, population, and wealth are concentrated in
large cities. This limits Venezuela's potential for economic
development and ability to feed itself. While Venezuela is one
of the world's largest oil exporters, it imports about 70 percent
of its food even though it has plenty of rich agricultural land. It
now has the smallest agricultural sector in all of Latin America
(6 percent of its GDP), and is the only country in the region that
is a net importer of agricultural products. In this distorted economy,
the rich have gained most from oil production while displaced
peasants lack work and go hungry because they no longer have
land on which to practice subsistence agriculture.
In order to address this problem, on March 20, 2003, president
Hugo Chávez launched a project under INTI called "Vuelta al
Campo" (Return to the Countryside). Its goal is to facilitate a
return to the country where-with access to land and credit-people
can begin to grow food. The program began with 23 families
from Caracas who, organized into the cooperative Los
Arbolitos, occupied 23 hectares of unused land in the state
of Lara. Acting on its commitment to food sovereignty, the
government is providing resources for Venezuelans to double
food production by 2007.
The Fate of Land Reform
Land reform is a work in progress. The outcome will depend
on whether the process can survive external and internal
pressures. We can help by pressuring our government to
respect Venezuela's democratic experiment.
Thanks to Marc Becker for this analysis.
Venezuela Information Office
733 15th Street NW, Suite 932
Washington, DC 20005
(202) 347-8081
www.veninfo.org
The Venezuela Information Office is dedicated to informing the
American public about contemporary Venezuela, and receives
its funding from the government of Venezuela. Further information
is available from the FARA office of the Department of Justice
in Washington, DC.
Venezuela: the promise of land for the people "I'm a landless peasant.
I've got land, but it's in the graveyard," says Jesús Vasquez. For years,
any campesino [Peasants, the rural poor] who trespassed on these
uncultivated tracts would be caught and imprisoned, or chased out
with bullets. The peóns (farm laborers) worked for the miserable
daily rate of 3,000 bolos [3,000 bolivars = $1.88]. On tiny fractions
of an acre, campesinos grow anaemic maize and live off the Holy
Spirit. Anyone who cannot afford to buy or rent an allotment rots,
confined to the four walls of some horrible slum on the edge of a town.
But those who are very hungry will not wait forever. On 14 October
2000, Jesús Vásquez, along with 25 men and one woman, occupied
part of Hato El Charcote. Its owner turned out to be the British Crown,
via Flora Companía Anónima. "The government asked them to present
the deeds, but they never did. It's effectively state land," explains Vásquez.
The enquiry by the National Land Institute (Instituto Nacional de Tierras,
INTI), created on 8 January 2002 to enact President Hugo Chávez's land
reforms, confirmed this. "Last year we harvested two tonnes of maize. This
year we reckon we'll get up to six tonnes and much more later on," says
a jubilant Vásquez. "People are growing things and have got enough to eat.
It's a magnificent development." - Maurice Lemoine, Le Monde
Diplomatique, October 2003.
http://mondediplo.com/2003/10/07venezuela
For more information and updates: vio@veninfo.org www.venezuelanalysis.com
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