A Revolution of conucos, chicken coops and empanadas...

<a href=www.vheadline.com>Venezuela's Electronic News Posted: Thursday, May 29, 2003 By: Gustavo Coronel

VHeadline.com commentarist Gustavo Coronel writes: The 'conuco' is a small patch of land traditionally cultivated in some Latin American countries by very poor farmers ... not for commercial purposes but for the subsistence of the family.  It usually consists of 2-5 acres of land on which the farmer, assisted by wife and/or children, cultivate basic crops such as corn, plantains, cassava and the like. In addition, there are a few chickens running around, a couple of pigs and a few mango trees.

The conuco is one of the most primitive forms of farming, and is related to the Arawak tribes found by the Spaniards when arriving to the new world. Later on, the conuco also became the patch of land given by large plantation owners to their slaves for personal usufruct (Merriam-Webster: the right to use or enjoy something).

The conuco is a backward form of farming because it often entails burning and clearing hillside slopes, which promotes soil erosion. As such it is an enemy of sustainable agriculture and of environmental protection, which are basic concepts of the new Law of Lands and Agrarian Development (Articles 1 and 2).

However, Article 19 of this law recognizes the conuco as the historical source of biodiversity (really?) and as the object of government protection and promotion. The "ancestral" technique, reads the Article, will be made known and disseminated by the government, as well as its techniques of "soil preservation."

In Article 20, the 'conuquero' is said to be guaranteed his/her patch of land ... in parallel, however, the current 1999 Constitution (Article 307) makes guaranteed food security a fundamental right for Venezuelans.

How to reconcile this Constitutional mandate with the objectives of conuco promotion contained in the lesser law is beyond my understanding.

The chicken coop is the second vertebra of the revolutionary spinal column. It aims at replacing commercial egg and chicken production with domestic chicken coops located on flat terrain or ... if need be ... flat rooftops, a variation which has been baptized as the "vertical chicken coop."

Many Venezuelan families have had chicken coops in their backyards for decades or even centuries. When I was 15, I took a course in aviculture in my spare time, learning about the different types of chickens and hens, those good for eating and those good for eggs. I even learned how to kill a chicken efficiently, by snapping its head backwards, although I never got to do it.

When we moved to Sabana del Medio (where we have almost 4 acres) we decided to install a chicken coop, much before the Presidential directive ... I felt that my theoretical knowledge of aviculture would allow us to produce the best eggs in the neighborhood.

We came to have about 20 hens and 2 roosters, but the hens were moody and stopped laying eggs without notice ... either due to sentimental problems or to the type of feed they got. After my calculations indicated that the eggs had a cost three times more than the ones we could buy in the market, we dissolved the coop ... to my great relief. The hens were greedy and wanton creatures...  If this experience of ours is a common one, I'm afraid that the Presidential plan is going to diminish the national GDP even further ... his initiative might well become what, in colloquial English, is known as "to lay an egg."

And now we come to the third component of the revolutionary economic program ... the so called "Ruta de las Empanadas" ... the Empanada highway, an almost military plan to establish a national grid of 'empanada' stations. The empanada is almost as popular as 'arepas' in Venezuela ... especially along the coastal towns, less so in the hinterland. The empanada is made of corn flour, not wheat flour as in Chile and Argentina. The dough is filled with shredded meat or black beans or cheese or 'cazon' ... a marine fish of the family of squalids ... the non-political variety ... in short, a small shark.

The empanada is a big favorite in the early mornings, and is eaten mostly standing up at a street corner or in popular markets such as Conejeros in Porlamar, Guaicaipuro in Caracas or La Marina in Maracaibo. It is also common at the small town fairs, where they compete with arepas and diverse meats, served from cauldrons, grills and spits by a swarm of women, all chanting the excellences of their offerings, while mumbling depreciatively about their neighbor's.

Traditionally, empanada stands crop up here and there, without discipline. As of now, however, the revolution will impose an impressive grid of some 4,000 empanada stations all over the country ... or so the government says ... in order to generate some 400,000 new jobs.

Although details are yet somewhat sketchy, the impression I get is that the country will be divided by imaginary lines intersecting at right angles, with an empanada station at every intersection ... something like an enormous bingo card. This would facilitate comparing the quality of, say, the empanadas at O-5 with those at M-9...

This bold and visionary initiative could generate some new jobs ... but it might destroy, among many others, the quaint, personalized, empanada stand of Misia Luisa in Puerto La Cruz ... the individual empanada site will be sacrificed to a large scale, impersonal, revolutionary empanada blitz.

I get the impression that the rather melancholy Chavez revolution is falling short of the answers required by the mounting social, economic and political problems of the country. In the manner of T. S. Elliot, one could say that:

This is the way the revolution ends This is the way the revolution ends... not with a bang, but a whimper...

History will talk about a failed experiment which tried to base Venezuelan society on pride in poverty and backwardness, in going back to Zamora and to being half naked...

People would not go for it...

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 gustavo@vheadline.com