EL CHARCOTE, Venezuela (Reuters) – It should have been a happy day on this vast farm as red harvesters sheared rice and tall corn.
However, Idelmaro Ceteno looked decidedly grumpy as the machines circled his land.
Ceteno is one of nearly 1,000 farmers given land five years ago by the government of president Hugo Chavez. The land had been part of the El Charcote farm, a vast cattle ranch that until then belonged to one of Britain’s wealthiest families, the Vesteys.
He has about 60 acres of prime land and access to cheap government loans to plant two harvests a year. State enterprises rent him farm machinery and sell him seeds, fertilizer and insecticide, all at low prices.
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However, Ceteno said yields could be 50 percent higher if El Charcote were drained and if loans arrived soon enough to plant at the right time.
“I have a harvest, sure, but ideally we’d be producing more, looking for higher yields for sustainable agriculture,” Ceteno said, wearing a red shirt and cap in support of Chavez’s socialist party. “We recovered this land to grow on it.”
El Charcote became a symbol of Chavez’s socialist revolution when he sent soldiers to seize it in a 2005 push to break up major ranches and repopulate rural areas largely abandoned since Venezuela’s oil industry took off in the 1920s.
The government recently bought the last 500,000 acres of Vestey land and 130,000 cattle, part of a new drive by Chavez to increase state control of food in South America’s top oil producer.
In the last five years, the state has expropriated and redistributed millions of acres of land deemed unproductive or without proper titles.
Chavez said the policies are boosting food production and easing rural poverty, but critics say they have been a major failure.
The huge Vestey land holdings were always going to be a target for the pugnacious son of poor teachers looking to bolster his standing as a nationalist and socialist.
El Charcote has met some of Chavez’s goals. The economy in Las Vegas, a town next door to the farm, has been revitalized by the influx of peasant families with government funds and produce to sell. However, it also symbolizes government missteps.
Much of the land is on a sodden flood plain. Only farmers on high ground can plant, and only well organized groups of peasants have won programs teaching them to grow rice and build roads to their new hamlets. Others languish in squalor.
Several thousand acres at El Charcote are now planted with rice and corn, and harvesters fanned out earlier this month to bring in the crops.
The former ranch house has been converted into a busy village school, teaching 150 children of the peasant families who live in mud-floored adobe and tin shacks.
“We’ve done well here, we’re working and producing,” said Carlos Rojas, resting with his brother, several chickens and a pig in the shade of a bamboo stand, preparing to harvest 60 acres of rice.
However, many of the farmers who came to El Charcote from across Venezuela hoping to grow arable crops have not fared so well, finding their entire harvest wiped out every year by flooding.
Critics of Chavez’s drive to break up big ranches say most of them are in swampy plains only suitable for raising beef.
“I lost one loan because this land flooded. The second credit the same, that was beans. This patch is not for planting, it’s for cattle,” said El Charcote farmer Angela Epinayu, whose tin shack is adorned with a poster of Chavez.
Tall weeds surround her hut and cover the unplanted acres.
Lord Sam Vestey, chair of the Vestey Group, is a friend of Prince Charles and rides behind the Queen in parades as her Master of the Horse. His company has owned land in Venezuela since 1903 but has been forced out by the latest Chavez purchases.
The government has channeled more funds to agriculture than its predecessors, but the land redistribution drive has failed to make Venezuela self-sufficient and it is now more reliant than ever on imported food.
Official statistics say food production is up 25 percent in the last decade, although it is disputed by some farm groups. Any rise in output has not met the increase in demand following Chavez’s programs to put more food on poor plates.
The government paid $4.2 million for the 32,000 acre El Charcote ranch and will likely give Vestey considerably more for the remaining ranches.
Epinayu is waiting for government help to buy cattle and equipment, as are many other El Charcote farmers whose wet land is better suited to ranching.
El Charcote’s ditches and rivers are silted up, and farmers say the government should dredge them so that rain water flushes away.
“This is not working as it should be,” said Clavier Tovar as a trailer filled with 17 tonnes of white corn freshly harvested from his plot with a government combine.
“Only this area has been planted, the rest is idle land. If this were used properly, it would be so beautiful.”
El Charcote, divided into lots that average 30 acres, also has success stories.
Farmers have pulled themselves up by their boot straps and pushed the government to build them roads and power lines. They have dug wells, planted rice on soggy ground and corn on drier land.
Luis Marin has a broad grin on his face after he splashes down with water after a hot morning working with his brother and son-in-law flicking fertilizer from sacks into a field of rice for one of the many co-operatives at El Charcote.
“We’re happy, we’ve got everything. We dug wells, and electricity recently arrived in our sector,” he said.
“We’ve received credits to grow corn in the rainy season. Now we’ll grow sorghum with a credit for the dry months.”
