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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@gilanet.com>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Fwd: [AlasBabylon] Venezuela plunges into urban agriculture
  • Date: Wed, 23 Apr 2003 10:28:23 -0600


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>Environmental News Network, 22 April 2003
>http://www.enn.com/news/2003-04-22/s_3912.asp
>
>Cuba Exports City Farming 'Revolution' to Venezuela
>By Magdalena Morales, Reuters
>
>
>CARACAS, Venezuela — In a conference room at Venezuela's military
>academy, a group of soldiers listen attentively to a duo of Cuban
>instructors.
>
>The topic being taught is not revolutionary guerrilla warfare as once
>practiced by Fidel Castro or "Che"
>Guevara, but the "organoponic farming revolution," communist Cuba's
>latest export to its closest South
>American ally, Venezuela.
>
>Organoponic gardening, a system of concentrated, organic urban vegetable
>cultivation, is taking root in
>central Caracas amid the piles of garbage, bands of homeless beggars,
>and tens of thousands of
>vehicles belching out polluting gas fumes.
>
>Inspired by Cuba's system of urban market gardens, which has been
>operating for several years, left-wing
>President Hugo Chavez has ordered the creation of similar intensive city
>plots across Venezuela in a bid
>to develop food self-sufficiency in the world's No. 5 oil exporter.
>
>"Let's sow our cities with organic, hydroponic mini-gardens," said the
>populist former paratrooper, who
>survived a brief coup a year ago and also toughed out a crippling
>opposition strike in December and
>January.
>
>Inside Fuerte Tiuna military headquarters, soldiers of the crack Ayala
>armored battalion supervised by
>Cuban instructors have swapped their rifles for shovels and hoes to tend
>neat rows of lettuce, tomatoes,
>carrots, coriander, and parsley.
>
>Since his election in late 1998, Chavez has drafted the armed forces to
>serve his self-styled "revolution"
>in a range of social projects, from providing medical services to
>running low-cost food markets for the
>poor.
>
>Besides the military vegetable patch in Fuerte Tiuna, the government has
>also planted a 1.2-acre plot in
>Caracas' downtown Bellas Artes district, overlooked by towering office
>blocks and located near the city's
>main museums.
>
>The market garden, denominated Bolivar 1 in honor of Venezuela's
>independence hero Simon Bolivar, is
>being run by an agricultural cooperative set up in a nearby poor
>neighborhood.
>
>PUBLIC SKEPTICISM
>
>The sight of sprouting vegetables nestling in concrete-lined earth beds
>behind wire fences in central
>Caracas causes many passers-by to stare in puzzlement.
>
>"This might be all right to provide for a family but not to feed a
>country," scoffed Diego Di Coccio, a
>40-year-old unemployed businessman.
>
>"They should use the money to unblock the drains," said chemical
>technician Hector Gonzalez, pointing
>to the piles of rubbish in the streets around.
>
>Skeptics question why resource-rich Venezuela should need urban
>vegetable gardens when it has
>hundreds of thousands of acres of fertile farming land, much not in use.
>
>The national farmers' federation Fedeagro, which groups 52 local
>associations around the country, says
>it is not opposed in principle to the urban food program. But it demands
>more government support for the
>farming sector, which contracted around 10 percent between 1998 and
>2002.
>
>"The problem is that it looks as though the government is concentrating
>all its efforts on these city
>farming plots, and yet the national sector remains in the state it's
>in," said Fedeagro's technical adviser
>Nelson Calabria.
>
>Private farmers and ranchers also accuse the government of threatening
>private property with a
>socialist-inspired agrarian reform law that says idle, uncultivated
>rural estates can be expropriated and
>distributed to landless peasants.
>
>But Chavez, a tough-talking nationalist, defends the urban garden plan
>as a necessary strategy to ward
>off the threat of food shortages and wean the country away from its high
>dependence on imports.
>Traditionally, more than 60 percent of the nation's food needs are
>imported.
>
>To the derision of critics, Chavez has also suggested that Caracas' slum
>dwellers, whose ramshackle
>hilltop homes ring the city, should raise crops and chickens on their
>balconies and rooftops. Turn your
>homes into "vertical henhouses," he said.
>
>The president, who is accused by his foes of ruining the oil-reliant
>economy with his anticapitalist
>rhetoric and interventionist policies, has also vowed to break what he
>says is a stranglehold on domestic
>food production held by rich "oligarchs" opposed to him.
>
>During the recent opposition strike, Chavez ordered troops to
>temporarily seize and search some
>privately owned food plants, which he said were deliberately hoarding
>food supplies.
>
>CUBAN INFLUENCE
>
>Critics of the president say he is using strict foreign exchange and
>price controls introduced this year to
>wage a vendetta against his business foes by denying them scarce U.S.
>dollars and forcing them to
>lower their prices.
>
>Others ridicule the urban vegetable gardens as little more than a
>political gimmick and another sign of
>Chavez's close ideological ties with his friend and ally Cuban President
>Fidel Castro, whom he regularly
>salutes as a revolutionary soulmate.
>
>Since Chavez came to power, Venezuela has become Cuba's single biggest
>trading partner, supplying
>the island with up to 53,000 barrels per day of oil in a bilateral
>energy agreement. Several hundred Cuban
>doctors, sports trainers, and technical advisers in areas like sugar
>farming are working in Venezuela.
>
>Although the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) also backs the
>Venezuelan urban farming
>project, the main inspiration and training comes from specialists from
>Cuba.
>
>The collapse from end-1989 of the Soviet bloc, Cuba's main political
>ally and supplier, plunged the island
>into economic crisis, and its government started up urban vegetable
>plots to counter critical food
>shortages caused by the loss of key farm-related imports like
>fertilizers and pesticides.
>
>Cuba claims that 50 percent of the vegetables produced on the island
>come from urban gardens, but
>local residents complain that the produce is poor and there are
>persistent shortages.
>
> "It was established that the main task of the revolution should be to
>produce food," Cuban Gen. Sio
>Wong, who is supervising the Venezuelan project, said in Caracas.
>
>HEALTH BENEFIT OR HAZARD?
>
>He hailed the benefits of the Caracas city plots. "No chemical products
>are used, so these are the
>healthiest vegetables that Venezuelans will eat," he said.
>
>But Venezuelan experts wonder whether the polluted atmosphere of central
>Caracas could turn the
>city-center vegetables into a health hazard. They say that the
>smog-filled air contains concentrations of
>carbon monoxide and lead that could contaminate growing plants.
>
>Despite the criticism, Chavez's government and its Cuban advisers are
>enthusiastic about the project,
>which involves an initial investment of around $2 million. The
>Agriculture Ministry hopes to plant 2,470
>acres of such urban vegetable gardens this year and aims to supply about
>20 percent of the nation's
>vegetables through the program.
>
>"The Hanging Gardens of Babylon that appear in the Bible were basically
>urban gardens," said Adolfo
>Rodriguez, head of Cuba's Urban Agriculture Project.
>
>*****
>For additional information see:
>
>Cuba - The Organic Revolution
>http://www.pan-uk.org/pestnews/Pn34/pn34p12.htm
>
>
>

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  • [Livingontheland] Fwd: [AlasBabylon] Venezuela plunges into urban agriculture, Tradingpost, 04/23/2003

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