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05-26-2009, 11:25 AM
Hugo Chavez's farm seizures show little results
By Fabiola Sanchez, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
EL CHARCOTE, Venezuela - This vast ranch used to be filled with grazing herds of cattle, but the green pastures are now overgrown with weeds and dotted with patches where poor farmers grow corn and beans. The cows have vanished.
The 12,950-hectare El Charcote Ranch in central Venezuela was meant as a showcase for President Hugo Chavez's agrarian revolution, turning a country with food shortages and runaway inflation into one that could feed itself.
But since troops and peasants seized the land from a British agribusiness company four years ago, beef production has dropped from 1.2 million kilograms annually to zero.
The ranch and many like it across the country raise the concern that the dream of a Venezuela living off its own land is just one more socialist promise heavy on rhetoric and light on results. The Chavez government says it has taken over more than 2.2 million hectares of farmland from private owners. Yet food imports have tripled since 2004, the year before Chavez began his aggressive reform program.
Even some Chavez fans are complaining, like Luis Emiro Gomez, 53, who lives in a shack of corrugated sheets patched with Chavez campaign posters. Gomez said he lacks credit, tools and sufficient water to increase his corn harvest. While he holds a government permit for his plot, he said many others who received land are well-off and have rented it to tenant farmers for profit.
"If the idea was for parcels to be for the peasants, why are they offering them to people who aren't needy?" Gomez asked.Article continued at http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/World/2009/05/25/9562731-ap.html
By Fabiola Sanchez, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
EL CHARCOTE, Venezuela - This vast ranch used to be filled with grazing herds of cattle, but the green pastures are now overgrown with weeds and dotted with patches where poor farmers grow corn and beans. The cows have vanished.
The 12,950-hectare El Charcote Ranch in central Venezuela was meant as a showcase for President Hugo Chavez's agrarian revolution, turning a country with food shortages and runaway inflation into one that could feed itself.
But since troops and peasants seized the land from a British agribusiness company four years ago, beef production has dropped from 1.2 million kilograms annually to zero.
The ranch and many like it across the country raise the concern that the dream of a Venezuela living off its own land is just one more socialist promise heavy on rhetoric and light on results. The Chavez government says it has taken over more than 2.2 million hectares of farmland from private owners. Yet food imports have tripled since 2004, the year before Chavez began his aggressive reform program.
Even some Chavez fans are complaining, like Luis Emiro Gomez, 53, who lives in a shack of corrugated sheets patched with Chavez campaign posters. Gomez said he lacks credit, tools and sufficient water to increase his corn harvest. While he holds a government permit for his plot, he said many others who received land are well-off and have rented it to tenant farmers for profit.
"If the idea was for parcels to be for the peasants, why are they offering them to people who aren't needy?" Gomez asked.Article continued at http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/World/2009/05/25/9562731-ap.html