An agrarian revolution in doubt

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 32,000-acre 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 2.6 million pounds 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 5.4 million acres 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 lacked 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 were well-off and had 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.

Critics say the government has been slow to help small farmers like Gomez, while at the same time its massive expropriations of farmland are discouraging investment in agriculture. So food imports have gone up from a longtime average of $75 per person per year to $267 per person per year, according to Carlos Machado Allison, an agriculture expert at the IESA business school in Caracas.

Chavez points out that cultivated farmland has grown 45% during his decadelong presidency.

The government says the rise in imports reflects consumer demand from a population that is growing and that has begun to climb out of poverty thanks to Chavez’s socialist reforms.

“We know in many cases the process of starting up new farms has had problems,” said Juan Carlos Loyo, who heads the government’s land-reform effort. “In four years, we’ve tried to make sure people are moving forward and building, but it’s been a process of great experimentation.”

The issue of land reform is one of the most controversial in Latin America. Various governments have launched land reform in an effort to alleviate vast income gaps between rich and poor or boost food production.

Brazil says it has set up settlements for landless farmworkers on more than 106 million acres of government-owned land and expropriated farmland since 2003. Nicaragua’s government took over the farmlands of dictator Anastasio Somoza and his allies after he was overthrown in 1979 and handed them out to farmers, cooperatives and state businesses.

In Cuba, Chavez’s friend and mentor Fidel Castro transferred more than 70% of privately held land to the state and small farmers almost five decades ago. But Cuba relies heavily on food imports today, and the government is trying to revive an agricultural sector crippled by mismanagement by offering unused land to private farmers.

Venezuela’s farmland expropriations began in earnest in 2005, with the government employing a 2001 law allowing it to seize lands deemed idle or not adequately used. Some landowners have received compensation, and others have mounted legal challenges with mixed results.

The government could still claim an additional 8.6 million acres of farmland, Loyo said.

Taking over ranches has helped boost Chavez’s popularity in rural areas. At El Charcote, the government also provides free education and healthcare.

“What’s important is to have work,” said Jose Nausa, 37, who rents seven acres from another person with a farming permit at El Charcote.

But other farmers like Gomez told the Associated Press that their production had lagged because of disorganized local councils and government delays in delivering aid such as agricultural loans.

Overall, production of corn, rice and chicken has increased under Chavez, agricultural expert Machado Allison said. But output has changed little for many foods and has plunged for beef, sugar and fruit -- contributing to inflation that hit 30.9% last year.

While Venezuela was nearly self-sufficient in beef production a decade ago, it now imports nearly half of the beef it consumes, he added. Beef prices have soared as a result.

El Charcote ranch once belonged to Agropecuaria Flora, owned by the British company Vestey Group, which handed it over to the government in March 2006 for $4.2 million -- after troops and farmers had seized it. The company moved its cattle to other ranches.

Though the government carved out dozens of 37-acre plots for small farmers, they cover just a small fraction of land previously used for cattle.

Such lackluster results have been the norm at many expropriated ranches, said Hiram Gaviria, a former agriculture minister who broke with Chavez in 2001. He said the government was boosting imports while “destroying the nation’s productive system.”

Loyo condemned the reselling of farming rights by some to make a profit. He said the government aims to instill a collective work ethic among farmers, help them plant more crops and create a farmers’ council at El Charcote in charge of making the unused land productive.

Chavez has promised to deepen his agricultural reform effort this year, and in recent months his government has taken over dozens more farms. The government has also turned for technical help to China, Iran, Cuba and Argentina.

“The day will come in the next few years when Venezuela will be self-sufficient,” Chavez said in a speech earlier this year. “And we will start to export food to help other countries.”