Intentions might be good but giving does not work.
www.vheadline.com Posted: Wednesday, February 19, 2003 By: Gustavo Coronel
VHeadline.com commentarist Gustavo Coronel writes: Governments often approach the fight against poverty with strategies based on giving rather than on empowering the people to become producers. They claim that since the poor has no land, no money, no food, they should be given all of these things so that they can stop being poor.
Intentions might be good but giving does not work. It seems to produce initial positive results but, after a while, the poor revert to being poor. Still worse, poor and frustrated. Land distribution and reform has been a recurrent theme in the fight against poverty in many developing countries . The record is, so far, not encouraging.
Some of the better experiences, such as those in Taiwan and South Korea, have included ingredients which are often absent in other land reform programs: financial credits and technical assistance.
In Venezuela the most ambitious land reform program in record was the one undertaken by Accion Democratica in the decade of the 1960s. It was a massive effort based in a detailed study made by the Agrarian Reform Commission. The program was executed entirely within the law. To support the program several Institutions were created or reinforced, such as the Agrarian National Institute, the Agricultural Bank and a Technical Assistance Division at the Ministry of Agriculture. Thousands of tractors were imported, together with other agricultural equipment. Most of the land distributed was public land but some private holdings were duly expropriated. The main efforts at land redistribution took place in the central portions of the country, in the Andes and in the States of Barinas and Portuguesa. Some were very successful such as the Turen Cooperative, in Portuguesa, which to this day is the Granary of Venezuela.
But it soon became evident that land reform does not yield instant results and that the effort has to be sustained over long periods of time to produce significant change. Three years after starting the program, only 60,000 families had been given ownership titles, half of the target. A modest 8% gain in agricultural output had been obtained. There is no doubt, however, that this program started by President Betancourt established a new class of small landholders in the country. By 1980 about 200000 families had been given ownership of land and, by 1985, a total of 316000 families were landowners. Very few, however, became organized in cooperatives. After this time, the Agrarian Reform lost drive and probably many of these rural families emigrated to the cities, after receiving little or no permanent government assistance.
Land reform in Venezuela, therefore, has a history. It did not start with Chavez. Moreover, what Chavez has done in this respect is almost nothing. The new Land Law is designed to attack private landowners but not to promote the well-being of the rural poor. The only program started by Chavez, The "Fundos Zamoranos", the Zamora Landholdings, has been a total failure due to the lack of financial and technical support. As a result the people involved in this modest program are now worse off and very angry with the government. They feel that they have been used for political propaganda and are now reacting openly against the program.
In general the failure of these programs has to do with the absence of commitment by the government after the initial ceremony of land "distribution" has been televised. The day after finds the colonies without water, without fertilizers, without guidance. The only thing that the government was interested in was the political impact of the initial events, usually adorned with a long speech by the President.
The efforts by this government to improve the lot of the rural poor are restricted to what the President improvises over TV. These improvisations usually die a merciful death or become laughable programs such as the conversion of rooftops into chicken coops. Others are simply absurd such as the Rural Kit, still in operation, a program through which each rural family obtained a Kit consisting of one pig, 100 chicks, a bag of cassava roots and a set of plows and hoes.
- Predictably the family would eat the pig and sell the chicks. This government advocates a return to "conuco" farming, the most primitive form of agriculture used by the Arawaks of pre-colonial Venezuela.
These things need to be said in order to challenge the notion that President Chavez is a pioneer in Land Reform. Not only he is not a pioneer but he has done little besides talking about the issue. Today the Venezuelan rural poor are in a worse situation than before.
Gustavo Coronel is the founder and president of Agrupacion Pro Calidad de Vida (The Pro-Quality of Life Alliance), a Caracas-based organization devoted to fighting corruption and the promotion of civic education in Latin America, primarily Venezuela. A member of the first board of directors (1975-1979) of Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), following nationalization of Venezuela's oil industry, Coronel has worked in the oil industry for 28 years in the United States, Holland, Indonesia, Algiers and in Venezuela. He is a Distinguished alumnus of the University of Tulsa (USA) where he was a Trustee from 1987 to 1999. Coronel led the Hydrocarbons Division of the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) in Washington DC for 5 years. The author of three books and many articles on Venezuela ("Curbing Corruption in Venezuela." Journal of Democracy, Vol. 7, No. 3, July, 1996, pp. 157-163), he is a fellow of Harvard University and a member of the Harvard faculty from 1981 to 1983. In 1998, he was presidential election campaign manager for Henrique Salas Romer and now lives in retirement on the Caribbean island of Margarita where he runs a leading Hotel-Resort. You may contact Gustavo Coronel at email ppcvicep@telcel.net.ve