Planting the flag on the ground and starting work on the land after six months of preparation and study. That’s the aim of Brazil’s Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (MST, in Portuguese) for carrying out its work in Vergareña, a region in southern Venezuela with more than 180,000 hectares for planting food based on agroforestry techniques. The goal: guarantee the country’s food sovereignty.
BdF was at Vergareña for five days and followed the arrival of members of the MST and the Unión Comunera, the Venezuelan organization with the greatest participation and capillarity among the country’s communes. They went to the area to start setting up the camp using equipment the government sent.
To begin with, the MST made it clear that the land was not donated by the Venezuelan government. Unlike what Brazilian newspapers have said in recent weeks, the movement will only be responsible for the administration and logistical support of the Patria Grande del Sur program. The project aims to produce a wide variety of foods in sufficient quantities to supply a considerable part of the country.
As well as having healthy food and guaranteeing the population access to quality products, one of the Venezuelan government’s intentions is to increase supply so that it diminishes prices for Venezuelans on the market. To this end, President Nicolás Maduro has asked the MST to help coordinate food production work in the region. After a thorough analysis of the territory by the country’s Ministry of Agriculture, the MST has identified where the plots for food production will be, defined the spaces in which families will live and has already started preparing for the arrival of residents.
Little by little over the last few weeks, Brazilian activists have been arriving at the Armed Forces structure in Vergareña. The site is 90km from Puerto Ordaz, the reference city for the Oriente region in eastern Venezuela. To get there, you need to take two hours on an asphalt road and another two hours on a dirt road or use a single-engine plane and land on a dirt runway next to the houses.
This is one of the main difficulties for the project to thrive. For the coordinator of the MST brigade in Venezuela, Rosana Fernandes, the main challenges for the project are not only the lack of infrastructure to reach the area but also for selling food on the market.
“One difficulty we have with selling what will be produced there is the infrastructure. It’s a challenge to access Vergareña from Puerto Ordaz or other big cities. But this is the government’s responsibility,” she told BdF.
The Venezuelan government and the MST understand that it is also necessary to occupy the territory, which is sparsely populated despite the large amount of land. Altogether, less than 60,000 people live in the municipality of Angostura, one of the towns that are part of Vergareña, which is the size of the Brazilian state of Paraíba.
Setting up the camp
The first step in occupying the area is to set up the camp where the families will be settled. It’s a model similar to that of the MST in Brazil but has some important differences regarding the way the process was carried out. The first of them is the acquisition of land.
Unlike what happens in Brazil, the MST didn’t have to identify and study unproductive land from a large estate owner or producer. The land already belonged to the Venezuelan government, and the Ministry of Agriculture itself carried out the study. For Gessica Lima dos Santos, an agroecology technician and one of the people responsible for the project in Venezuela, this has advanced a process that in Brazil would not only take time but also a struggle to comply with the Constitution.
“Here we have something that in Brazil would take 30, 40 years to get. [In Venezuela] We already have the land. We’ve already conquered the territory and we have all the necessary tools to set up the camp, provided by the government itself. In Brazil, we would still have to understand the territory, study it and even then, we would still have conflicts with landowners themselves, which would demand a long process of struggle,” he told BdF.
The idea is to settle 300 families in the camp to work on producing food. For these people to arrive, it is necessary to set up a structure with bathrooms, a kitchen, bedrooms and leisure areas, such as a soccer field. In addition, one of MST’s pillars is training. For this reason, an agroecology and political training school will also be set up. This unit will also focus on training peasants who know how to produce seeds for planting.
There will also be a plenary space for collective discussions and decisions. The land is around 40km from where AgroFanb, the agricultural production unit of the Bolivarian National Armed Forces, is currently based. This space houses the government’s military structure in the region and receives equipment, supplies and the first new residents to arrive.
The area can be reached by small planes through a dirt runway or by car from Puerto Ordaz, the capital of the state of Bolívar. Even though they are far from the biggest cities in the region, these 300 families will be working at Vergareña once the project is up and running. This entire contingent of people will be mobilized mainly by the Unión Comunera and will stay in the camp the MST set up in conjunction with the Venezuelan Ministry of Agriculture.
For this reason, the camp was designed to be in a strategic location with both easier access to the Vergareña military structure and other points in the region, as well as being on high ground, where it is easy to see all of the territory.
Agroforestry at the basis
The main concepts the MST adopted for food production are those of agroecology and, within that, agroforestry, which will also apply at Vergareña. This form of production is based on preserving the soil and the biome to guarantee enough healthy food for the subsistence of local communities while supplying the market with pesticide-free products.
For the coordinator of the MST brigade in Venezuela, Rosana Fernandes, this way of producing food also changes social relations. As well as a technical issue, she points out that the adoption of agroecology also means a political stance.
“It confronts capital and climate crises and contributes to the country’s food sovereignty. The MST sees agroecology and agroforestry as a way out of the crises we face and also challenges itself to build together with the Venezuelan people, starting with solidarity between peoples and class struggles, from popular sovereignty. It is not only about the production of healthy food but also healthy human relations, building human emancipation in this context,” she said.
Among the fundamental points for the MST in changing the current perspective of production in the region is to change the way land is cleared there. Today, local communities use fire between harvests in order to start planting again. According to the MST’s agroforestry workers, despite increasing productivity at first, repeating this practice damages the soil and reduces planting capacity at each new harvest.
Vergareña also has a geographical particularity, as it is a transition area between a humid biome like the Amazon and a dry one like the savannah. For this reason, fire also damages the biodiversity of a place that has species from different areas.
For Gessica Lima, one of the biggest difficulties in implementing agroforestry in Vergareña will be changing the mentality of producers who work on the territory. In her opinion, the agribusiness production logic has become established as the only possible alternative. Therefore, changing not only the techniques used but also the tradition will be an important step for the project.
“We built the agroecology movement in a more critical sense, and sometimes we get frustrated with the production system adopted in different areas we visit. But we have to understand that we are in the capitalist system. So, the practices we reproduce are the practices that are shown to us. It has been years of degradation, of conventional planting, one that benefits this very system,” she said.
For Altamir Bastos, there are also conditions set for the population. According to him, a change in the way of production requires equipment that optimizes the work of the workers, something that is expensive and difficult to access for those in the countryside.
“What we see is that people use fire because they don’t have access to adequate equipment to produce food. Since they can’t afford to buy a tractor, even collectively, or pay for someone to come and prepare the land, people use fire to be able to plant. They clear the land to sow, and poison is still used a lot as well,” he said.
The Venezuelan government has bought Chinese agricultural machinery to help with this production. Electric brushcutters, tractors, motor cultivators and fertilizers are already being bought and taken to Vergareña.
Organization and production
The project’s tasks have been defined in working groups. Each of them will be responsible for a different sector according to the needs of the camp: health, security, transportation and cleaning are some of them.
Another fundamental topic for the organization is the definition of spaces for the production of each kind of food item. A team is responsible for choosing some areas called “showcases”, to start testing production on a smaller scale before expanding it. The aim is to test the soil and the way the community deals with the agroforestry approach, as well as to start putting products on the market to serve as a demonstration.
All of this will be coordinated by a grassroots nucleus made up of representatives from the MST, the Unión Comunera and the government. There will be executive coordination, with members of these 3 groups, and general coordination, with only the MST’s political and technical collective.
According to Gessica Lima, the Venezuelan government’s involvement makes a big difference to the organization of the camp and the structuring of food production, as well as helping with the marketing of the products. She said that one of the MST’s aims is also learning about the government’s relationship with the Venezuelan people.
“It’s a government structure, a systematic structure. It has a connection with the government, but the people still have to fight for things to happen. One of them is the marketing policies for these producers. The MST is coming to contribute to this organization and, of course, also to learn what this link between the government and the people is like,” she said.
Initially, the work will be carried out on just 4,200 hectares as a transition from the current form of production to an agroecological system. The Vergareña territory is currently occupied by Indigenous communities, five communal councils and the Armed Forces.
The main foods produced in the region are yams, papaya, cassava, bananas, pumpkins and sugar cane. Of these, the product with the largest scale of production is bananas, with 1,125 tons per year. They also raise animals, with 42 tons of cheese and 42 tons of meat per year. The goal is to expand the quantity and variety of food production.
For the 2025 winter cycle, the goal is to grow 30,000 tons of corn, 1,500 tons of beans and 1,000 tons of chicken, all through agroforestry production.
In addition to sufficient food production, the government and the MST have defined other objectives for the project: Contributing to the implementation of a production plan for the 2025 harvest, gradually expanding the camp with new families and helping to define ways of organizing collective marketing based on public policies.
Among the lines of action are also the creation of a credit line and a public procurement fund for the products, as well as the construction of local agro-industries with cooperation processes, with a view to the collective organization of work and families’ self-management. An agricultural census is also on the horizon for the Patria Grande del Sur project.
The government hopes to have a direct impact on the region’s economic development and environmental sustainability, improving people’s quality of life and strengthening its regional identity. All of this also involves technical education and political training, which will be carried out by the school set up by the MST in the region.
There is, however, a difference between what the MST does in Brazil and what it does in Venezuela. While on the one hand the struggle is for agrarian reform, on the other, the idea is to collaborate with production and pass on technical knowledge.
“We don’t intend to intervene directly in how they produce. We are trying to create possibilities for them to happen. In Brazil, it’s much more difficult to have a tool to fight these issues because we don’t have a good relationship with the government. It’s different here since the Venezuelan people have a good relationship with the government,” said Lima.
Partnership with the Unión Comunera
Despite spearheading the project, the MST will transfer its management over time to the Unión Comunera. The Brazilian movement assumes that it has mastered the technique and knowledge of agroecology, but that Unión Comunera is able to organize Venezuelan families and systematize food production.
“We don’t want to be the protagonists of this story. The leading role in this story falls to the Unión Comunera because the Unión Comunera must be at the forefront, organizing the grassroots, the communes and, of course, strengthening the movement even more by creating, captivating and building together,” said Gessica Lima.
Last weekend, activists from the Venezuelan organization traveled to the region to set up the structure of the camp together with the MST and learn the techniques used by the Brazilian movement to start the work. The relationship between the two groups began with the founding of the Venezuelan institution, in which the MST took an active part.
History of Vergareña
Hato da Vergareña was founded in 1953 by the then governor of Bolívar state, Horacio Cabrera. The site was focused on cattle production and was later sold to American businessman Daniel Keith Ludwig. His idea was to turn Vergareña an important production hotspot in the state. To this end, he brought 18,000 head of cattle to the region.
Former president Hugo Chávez changed the shape of Vergareña in 2005, when he started discussing agrarian reform and talking about idle land and properties without legal documents. This move was part of a change in the government’s attitude towards mining production, which began to try to recover for the State the territories used for illegal mining.
Chávez bought the 187,000-hectare Vergareña territory in 2006. Since then, the Venezuelan government has developed a series of forestry and agricultural projects, using the Zamorano Funds agricultural cooperation system. AgroFANB was also a military project that began to be developed in the Vergareña area with commercial alliances and an agricultural revitalization in the region.
