The Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (MST, in Portuguese) has been working with the Venezuelan government on various projects for 20 years. As well as helping them produce seeds and developing an agroforestry technique, the movement also aims to train Venezuelan activists politically and theoretically. For this reason, the MST, in partnership with the El Panal Commune, began their communal journey for agrarian reform last week.
The initiative includes a cycle of debates and seminars over six months. The idea is to hold monthly forums, s and exercises with young people in neighborhoods to discuss agrarian reform in Venezuela.
The inauguration event was held at the Patria Grande Pluriversity in El Panal commune. The space in the 23 de Enero neighborhood has been training young people for three years and aims to expand access to education from a people’s perspective. In this context, a professor from Pluriversity ed the journey, which aims to debate production and land use even in urban communes.
Caracas has 165 communes. Unlike communal organizations in the countryside, land use in the capital is different, with reduced agricultural production compared to rural communes.
Cira Pascual is a researcher and professor at Patria Grande Pluriversity who took part in the journey. She says that it is necessary to discuss the use of land in different contexts, particularly in a political dispute with large landowners.
“This is an urban commune, but we also have to think about land because the dispute over it in a revolutionary context is still an issue where we have to advance. We have the land law, great progress with the urban land committees and urban land ownership. However, we have to understand the struggle for land from a class point of view,” she told BdF.
The purpose of the journey is to give historical context to the use of land in Venezuela and to deepen the theoretical debate on food production by people and land ownership. According to the professors, it is necessary to reflect on the function of private property in the country to “continue fighting for land”. For the comuneros of El Panal, this whole debate needs to have a socialist perspective.
One of the instruments in the debate is the Land and Agrarian Development Law. Approved in 2001 during the Chávez government, the regulations set a new horizon for land use in Venezuela. Even without proposing a broad agrarian reform, the law became the first step towards discussing a new model for land ownership in the country.
The law lays the foundations for “integral and sustainable rural” development with fair distribution of wealth and strategic, democratic and participatory planning, ending large estates and outsourcing. Another important aspect the law presents is guaranteeing the protection of biodiversity and food security by ending unproductive large estates.
The 2001 legislation also created the National Land Institute (Inti, in Spanish) to regulate, manage and redistribute agricultural land, with the power to expropriate private land if it is considered idle or uncultivated, in exchange for compensation.
It also defined that land held by the state or expropriated areas could be handed over to farmers, cooperatives or communities for use or collective ownership. Limits were also set on the size of private properties, and those that exceeded these limits could be expropriated. The National Land Registry was also created to identify productive, idle or state-owned land.
The 2001 law also promoted sustainable agriculture, encouraged small and medium-sized producers and banned foreign ownership of land.
Historian and researcher Dulce Marrufo agrees that this opens the doors for agrarian reform, but discussing it also helps to improve and make effective the concepts raised in the law itself.
“Discussing and studying to be able to build what the agrarian reform process has been like in Venezuela is key, especially in a context of economic blockade. The discussion around agrarian reform also forces us to think about how we reorganize ourselves, how we can redistribute and produce focusing on food production, as well as how we preserve nature. How can we achieve equitable justice when solving the housing problems of a population that is increasingly demanding the rights that are in our 1999 Constitution?” she told BdF.
The partnership with MST is fundamental to this issue. The movement has been discussing agrarian reform in Brazil for 40 years and has become a theoretical reference for the discussion around the world. While in Brazil the MST seeks agrarian reform and the settlement of landless families, in Venezuela the movement contributes with political and technical training and seeks to develop agroecology in productive spaces.
The militants have the challenge of developing these techniques in urban areas across the country, something that is already being done in various neighborhoods in Brazil. Camilo Tamayo is a member of the Alexi Vive group, which is based in the El Panal commune. He said that the movement has also played an important role in the productive organization of urban communes.
“We have two theses. Firstly, the industrialization of neighborhoods. We talk about creating industries capable of processing the raw materials that come from the outskirts of the city, especially when we have our own urban experiences. We’re trying to transform raw materials, advance towards having the first communal city in Venezuela, which has the means of primary production to processing and distribution,” he told BdF.
Agrarian reform in Venezuela is hampered by large landowners who do not fully utilize their productive spaces. Society is still structured around oil production, which dictates the use of land as the basis of capitalist production.
Cira Pascual stresses that this is a gap that militants still need to debate to improve the law and achieve agrarian reform in the country.
“We still have some pending issues. There are lands in the hands of large landowners. It’s a society that has been crossed by oil rentism, which has led to people leaving the countryside for the city because they supposedly have better conditions here. In the Venezuelan context, there is a lot of non-productive land. We’re not betting that the bourgeoisie will produce, but that the organized people, with a socialist horizon, will have the land,” he said.
