A project to guarantee Venezuela’s food sovereignty: This is how the Patria Grande del Sur program is being treated by the Venezuelan government and the Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (MST, in Portuguese). The initiative was launched two weeks ago and will use 180,000 hectares for food production based on agroecology.
Rosana Fernandes has been coordinating the MST brigade in Venezuela for two months. The movement has been active in the country for 20 years and is now the central organization leading the project in southern Venezuela. She says it intends to occupy the territory of Vergareña and expand the food production carried out by small families in the region.
She received BdF at the MST office in Caracas and said there are many challenges to overcome, such as occupying an area that is isolated in the south of the country. Angostura, the municipality where the project is headquartered, has 57,000 inhabitants on a territory the size of the Brazilian state of Paraíba. Dealing with the limitations derived from the region’s low population density is one of the first tests the project faces: There is a lack of structure, such as roads for transporting materials.
For Fernandes, improvements in the region’s infrastructure will make it possible to expand the marketing of products and the flow of food production. Rosana Fernandes has been with the MST for 29 years. She was born in the state of Mato Grosso, where her involvement in activism also started. However, she became a leader in Goiás. In 2014, she became the coordinator of the Florestan Fernandes National School. An educator, the brigade’s coordinator is finishing her doctorate in education at the University of Campinas (Unicamp, in Portuguese) while reconciling her work in Venezuela and her family.
Even with the Venezuelan government’s enthusiasm for the project, Fernandes is cautious and says that the whole process will take time and needs to fulfill a series of stages and an action plan before it reaches full capacity. Venezuela has not yet set a production target. The area is being studied, and the quantity will be defined according to the project’s progress and the occupation of the territory.
Read below the main excerpts of the interview:
BdF: You’ve been here in Venezuela for two months. You arrived in a context where the MST already has a relationship with the Venezuelan government, dating back to former president Hugo Chávez. There is a consolidated political line between the movement and the Bolivarian revolution. How have you perceived the MST’s ties with the Venezuelan government over the last two months? Do you think it is open to these initiatives? Is there a political rapprochement and what are the terms for this?
Rosana Fernandes: It’s important to start by saying that, beyond the MST’s relationship with the Venezuelan government, the MST defends a project that is underway, from the revolutionary perspective of countries’ sovereignty. More than that, it is a relationship with the Venezuelan people.
This year, coincidentally, is also the MST’s 20th anniversary of sending militants to the Apolonio de Carvalho internationalist brigade here in Venezuela. And these people – us, the militants, the leaders who are here – have direct contact with the territories, with the people who are in the countryside, from the perspective of training, education, agricultural production in the debate on gender relations… In short, it is more than this connection that we also have directly, and which is now more closely linked to the Pátria Grande del Sur project, a food sovereignty project with the Venezuelan government.
We understand that this historical relationship has grown from time to time and seek concrete actions. So, the Patria Grande del Sur project comes from this perspective, something which is also a great challenge for the Venezuelan government, a large territory with communes, Indigenous communities and a relationship with the military. To build this food sovereignty project together. The MST is also challenged these in a good way.
It is also committed and willing to work with the state, the government and the military on a food sovereignty project in a country that faces a specific political and economic situation, as well as geopolitical relations in the international arena.
You talked a bit about Venezuela’s food sovereignty issue. What is the importance of the project in this sense and, above all, what impact do you see for the country?
We have some lines of action being built, which will unfold in several other concrete actions within the great objective of Patria Grande del Sul, which is to leverage and consolidate the country’s food sovereignty.
From the production of subsidies, we want to leverage a trade process for the families who are already there. Therefore, training, healthy food production and marketing are three explicit axes that this project is designed to address.
The region is quite isolated, so to speak, from the rest of the country. The project is in a rural area that also deals with infrastructure difficulties in getting to the urban centers of nearby towns, due to roads and bridges.
This also means that a broader marketing strategy is needed. We’re betting on agro-industry processes to improve or qualify all production so it can reach more distant markets.
We are also carrying out studies that envisage organizing and setting up agro-industries for the production that is most present there. There’s a lot of manioc and papaya production… Apart from that, this large inverted area also produces grains and seeds for reproduction in other parts of the country.
We are also carrying out studies that envisage organizing and setting up agro-industries for the production of the most common food there. There’s a lot of manioc and papaya production… But apart from that, this large area also has grain and seed production aimed at other regions of the country.
We will provide them with training for production, selling their products and making investments, that is, structures that enable the MST to work cooperatively. All of this is preponderant for commercial structures as well.
This also involves how families can self-organize so as to leverage a greater marketing process.
There is already a diagnosis of the area that found that families there produce a lot, [particularly] those who live in communal councils. However, in the existing communities, there is already a lot of food production, but that’s family production aimed at their survival, something very local, at most for a small town nearby. And it can’t go very far because it’s perishable.
Also, how the state can expand public policies based on this experience so that the country can also develop and encourage food production and marketing in other regions through public resources.
In Brazil, we have the Food Acquisition Program (PAA, in Portuguese) and the National School Feeding Program (PNAE, in Portuguese), which are two cases of public policies that can be examples that fit into the current Venezuelan reality. We have many tasks, many actions, and we are willing to contribute to this process.
Have you calculated roughly how food production works today on the territory of Patria Grande del Sul, in terms of quantity? There is subsistence production for the families themselves, but can you estimate more or less how much is already produced and how much needs to be increased? In other words, what is the goal for food production in this territory?
Venezuela’s Ministry of Agriculture has a survey of the amount of cassava, papaya, sugar cane and yam production, which is also one of the most produced foods there.
Regarding what we want to achieve, we are still working with very general data. We need to expand what exists and start other cultures that don’t yet exist, but we haven’t yet quantified these goals because, although we are making progress, this production is still in its infancy.
What we have so far is a more general plan of action, but it hasn’t been defined yet. It’s a huge project and we know the results won’t come in a year or two. It will take time to build it.
But we are considering that it is necessary to populate that territory and expand the population that exists to meet the goals that the Venezuelan state is setting, which is to achieve food sovereignty. President Maduro has said that Venezuela has achieved food sovereignty, but this has to be maintained permanently.
So, every year, during every harvest, this has to be expanded or, at least, consolidated in terms of current production. So, I can’t say right now about estimates of the volume of this production.
You also spoke a lot about the difficulties of this initiative. It’s based in an isolated territory that needs to be populated. What other obstacles do you see in implementing such a large project?
There’s a geopolitical element to it, too, because there’s tension as it’s a territory on the border with Guyana, which is close to the Essequibo, a disputed territory. So, there is also a need to have Venezuelans on that territory.
The expansion of the population is being done with the Unión Comunera, which already has experience and a peasant production approach focused on self-sufficiency.
The Unión Comunera is one of the grassroots organizations working with the MST to build this territory, expand it and implement the project. One of the actions we are now taking together with the Unión Comunera is to set up an encampment where families from other regions can move to build their lives. We hope to set up this encampment at the beginning of April this year.
We want to establish this encampment as a big school that will think about the infrastructure of the place, but also start the process of technical and political training in agroecology with these families. The idea is for the experiences to begin there with this understanding and conception of agroecology in mind and, at first, at an experimental level.
There is this prospect of expanding the population and carrying out the first experiments in agroecology with whatever is possible, along with the concept of agroforestry. There will also be training for the existing communities. This school will be the basis for discussing and understanding agroecology and transitioning from what they currently produce – which is not agroecological. There is a need for it to be agroecological, and also an understanding of caring for nature and people’s lives.
We’re thinking of a broad production area, especially for corn, and it’s also a suitable region for livestock. Regarding animal protein, we think about how it is also linked to a system. We have experience in Brazil, so it’s also possible to implement this system here.
