Carlos Machado Allison is a retired Professor from Universidad Central de Venezuela who now Works at IESA. Carlos’s specialty is land use. Personally, I have never heard anyone in Venezuela talk about land use with Carlos’ knowledge, so I thought I would translate parts of his article this week in El Universal on the issue:
The land the Government works on by Carlos Machado Allison
Agricultural producers know agrarian demagoguery, with its vote capture potential and international sympathy at the expense of destroying trust. Its goal is not to improve production, productivity or the capability to feed the population, after all, powerful and with a good flow of US dollars, the state can continue importing and selling at a loss as long as it creates sympathies among the poor. It is a matter of perpetuating itself in power, Maduro dixit, increasing the size of the bureaucracy and imposing a state capitalism using the style of Mexico in the pre- war
In the revolutionary Mexico, General “Tata” Cardenas created the pro-Government Confederacion Campesina (Peasant Federation) (CNC), converted the Mexican Confederation of Workers in to an arm of the Government (1937) and threatened the industrials sector with handing the factories over to the workers, it distributed 19 million Hectares, without forgetting a piece for the revolutionary politicians and generals, created the mega bureaucracy of Pemex, managing to have it lose money for more than 40 years and also reduced agricultural production by 7%.
But the Partido de la Revolucion Mexicana with its sector, workers, peasants, military and popular, rebaptized in 1946 as PRI, remained in power until five years ago. The peasants, like here, lacked title to their property and depended, financially, commercially and technically on the bureaucratic apparatchik. Velasco in Peru and the Sandinistas in Nicaragua did even worse, killing agricultural production, increasing agricultural imports and creating programs and state companies to administer foodstuffs. Poverty and unemployment grew, but the revolutionaries in the unions, bureaucratic positions and mayors and Governors got wealthy: a new oligarchy arose. Much like it is happening here.
If the purpose were to give away land, with all of the demagoguery, bureaucratic expense and inefficiency that it implies, there are between 15 and 20 million unproductive hectares in the hands of the state. The truth is that they don’t even know how much they have. Then, why an instantaneous militia census of private land with no technical basis? Why threaten everyone, if the little blue book (the Constitution) clearly says that the Government can expropriate for the public good with a sentence from a Court and payment of fair value. Could it be to threaten the Government’s adversaries while obtaining applauses from the “poor” beneficiaries? There will be some success, some will abandon the business, others will hold on hoping for better times and there will be others who will try to sell, if this Government, full of foreign currency decides to purchase the land, even if it does not know what for.
In another early surprise, the President will say that the militia has discovered thousands of unproductive hectares, that people are fattening the land and not the cattle. He will not say that there is unproductive land because consumption has been eroded, because there is unemployment and no personal or judicial security. He will not say either that there is not trustable census of land use and that in six years; agricultural productivity has been the worse in the continent. He will say that the land belongs to those that work it, that is, as long as it does not belong to that large real estate company, the state, which he presides.
The Devil's Excrement 
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