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Edited on Sun Jan-23-11 03:53 PM by Peace Patriot
of the article (and when they suggest 12 places you would want to be in a food crisis, they get downright silly talking about big gold mines and what not).
No question that Venezuela has a food security problem, brought on by decades of rightwing misrule, which allowed a huge portion of Venezuela's farm land to fall into disuse--while peasant farmers (the best farmers) were driven from the land into urban squalor. Most of the land ended in the control absentee landowners or the very rich who don't even raise cattle. Meanwhile, the rich and the powerful created a well-off urban elite dependent on the oil riches and on imports, including food imports. And they in turn built practically nothing--neglected local manufacturing, even imported machine parts for the oil industry--and disdained the poor majority, couldn't care less about them or the social viability of their country. They let the jobless migrants, pushed off their farm lands, live in shantytowns in Caracas, built on steep hillsides imperiled by rain and flood, with no streetlights, no police protection or other services, and, of course, they utterly neglected education, job training, health care and other bootstrapping of the poor that decent societies undertake. The "get rich quick" lure of the oil profits led to atrocious social policy and loss of food security.
One great tragedy of this sort of fascist/neo-liberal ("free trade for the rich") policy (or lack of policy) is that people who could have been feeding their families and communities, with good organic food, who have the know-how to do this, have been doing it for thousands of years, are not only deprived of the little plots of land they needed to grow food, but they lose their knowledge of farming. It is not passed to the next generation. This is a worldwide phenomenon, and there is a worldwide campesino (small farmer) movement trying to counter it.
In any case, it hit urbanized Venezuela pretty hard. It is a VERY DIFFICULT problem, at that late stage of the game (unlike, say, Bolivia, which still has a considerable campesino population actively farming food). For one thing, you can't force people back to the farm, in a democracy. You have to entice them. For another, knowledge and skill have been lost. For another, the rightwing and their U.S. multinational corporate/war profiteer allies will fight you every step of the way. For another, if your constitution protects private property rights--as Venezuelan's new constitution does--you have to find government land and untitled or questionably titled lands to restore to food farming. And for another, you have first to help the vast poverty-stricken poor majority, most of which is urban--much of it jobless, uneducated, and suffering poor nutrition and handicaps of every kind.
The Chavez government began immediately to address the food security problem, with a new, and very well-thought out land reform program. Past land reform had failed in Venezuela and other places because it was not sufficiently regulated and became corrupt--the rich using land giveaways to benefit the rich--and it didn't produce food. The Chavez program requires five years of good food production to earn title to the farm land. It also requires and provides training, and it provides generous loans and other farmer assistance. The government food security program is also providing assistance to fisherfolk and other food producers and it is siding with the campesinos in on-going struggles with big landowners (which employ methods like death squads and other oppression) to regain rightful campesino farm lands. And they have now created a government-run supermarket system--and have just started a restaurant system--which guarantees low cost food to the poor, and provides the new food producers with steady markets.
To turn an urbanized country and economy that is importing much of its food back into a country that can feed itself is not only difficult, it takes time--decades. The government has to commit to this over a long period of time. Lands need to be surveyed, and land titles researched, and lands need to be evaluated for what they can best grow, and fertile land restored if that is possible. Agriculture training centers and science centers need to be established. New farmers, of course, suffer crop failures and other problems and need a lot of help along the way. And the entire system of production, transport, marketing and consumption needs to be evaluated, created or improved. One more thing, the Chavez government is trying to convert their agriculture to organic--to give up chem fertilizers and pesticides--which is not as easy as it sounds, when so much traditional knowledge has been lost and needs to rediscovered, and of course with corporate interests fighting that as well.
I don't have stats on on-going accomplishments, successes or failures. I know they are very serious about it, there is a lot of activity and it has been on-going for most of the decade. I read an excellent analysis of this food security program at the "Food First" web site--which I will try to find and post here.
This article or lame-brained study, or whatever it is, published by "Business Insider," does NOT include or evaluate the government's commitment to food security and to providing food for its people, nor the intelligent attention to this problem that is evident, for instance, in the Chavez government--the effort to address the problem, the long term planning and indications that the government is "of, by and for the people"--rather than the tool of rich or violent elites. Is the government stable, viable and popular? How is it addressing food issues, and how would it likely behave in a crisis? And what are the pressures--for instance, Venezuela has some private food producers and retailers in league with the rightwing and the U.S., who have hoarded food trying to drive up prices and bring down the government. They haven't succeeded, because the Chavez government is like the "New Deal" government was in the U.S.--strong leftist leadershiip on behalf of the poor. Is that true of Sudan or Kenya? This is a very important part of the equation, as to a food "price spike" crisis hitting the country.
One other factor, as to Venezuela being a place imperiled by food "price spikes": the Chavez government has ALSO worked on trade alliances, and in particular on barter trade alliances (the new trade group, ALBA). It has traded cheap or free oil for food. Venezuela has LOTS of oil--the biggest reserves in the world--twice the reserves of Saudi Arabia, according to the USGS. It has a lot of bargaining power and it has worked hard on establishing new kinds of trade. It is also strongly allied with numerous other countries with leftist governments in Latin America--including Brazil, Bolivia, Ecuador, Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, Nicaragua, Cuba and others. It has friends. It has strong working relationships with nearby countries that have a common set of goals including social justice. It has additional economic partners around the world, including China and Russia, and it just signed a peace pact with Colombia, re-starting trade over their long mutual border. This also makes a big difference in a crisis. What are the country's regional alliances? What are the region's prospects for cooperation?
Finally--something this uninformative article doesn't mention--Venezuela was just designated THE most equal country in Latin America, on income distribution, by the UN Economic Commission on Latin America and the Caribbean. The Chavez government has reduced poverty by half and extreme poverty by over 70%. "GDP per capita" is an average. It does not reflect how wealth is distributed--and that is very, very, very important, as to a country's current food distribution, and how a country will respond to a food crisis. A country where the rich rule and hoard the wealth may well see mass starvation in a food crisis. But a country with a government committed to equality and empowerment of the poor majority will strongly act to spread out the impacts of a crisis more evenly, and to solve the problem.
I don't think the criteria used for this list were at all adequate to make any predictions. And I question the placement of Venezuela first--in the photographs and on the list--when it is actually #25 in their own worthless evaluation. Is this typical anti-Chavez propaganda, of the kind that we have seen relentlessly in the corpo-fascist press? Could be accidental, but I wonder.
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Edited for typos.
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