Hugo Chavez continues to defy globalists

When Hugo Chavez came to power in 1998, five percent of Venezuela’s population owned 80 percent of the country’s best farmland. The rich controlled prices by engineering shortages. They also planted things like sugar cane, which brought high profits for them on the world market, but caused Venezuela’s poor to starve.

As a result, Venezuela, unlike many of its neighbors, long imported most of its food, and used less than 30 percent of its arable land to its full potential.

In 2002 Chavez moved to change all that. He seized 3.4 million acres from the wealthy elite, and built utopian farming villages for more than 15,000 families, lavishing money on new cooperatives, and sending army commando units to supervise estates in six states. Chavez wants to make better use of idle land, and make Venezuela less dependent on transnational food companies.

Corrupt landowners have hired mercenaries to fight back, but they are losing, and Bush is powerless to help them.

The Chávez Administration builds “communal towns” that have rows of three-bedroom homes (rent-free) plus a reading room, a radio station, a building with free high-speed Internet service, a school, and a plaza. Poor farmhands and unemployed town dwellers are filled with optimism.

With financing from state banks, the cooperatives plant crops like manioc, corn and beans, which are better suited than sugar cane to local soils.

U.S. and European economists are screaming. They say Chavez will make Venezuela more dependent on imported food. (Satanic oppressors always say that if their power is removed, evil will result.) They say the rich must control everything, or there will be no investments in land and in agricultural production. When all else fails, they simply throw out the buzzword “socialism.” They say that unless transnational corporations own everything, we are all doomed.

Chavez disagrees.

Source:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/17/world/americas/17venezuela.html?_r=1&h...

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COMMENT:

City dwellers hear about age-old battles for “land reform,” but rarely understand it, since they live in urban labor camps, where they are shuffled around, laid off en mass, and treated like rats in a cage. Nonetheless they consider themselves “superior” to farmers, even though they depend on farmers for food.

Private individual farmers are different. They see land as an extension of themselves. They do not get as lonely as city dwellers, for they are not alienated from nature, or from each other. When giant corporations steal their land, farmers feel that their family has been slaughtered.

Chavez seems to understand this, and I find his efforts at land reform encouraging.