Venezuela

A predominantly agricultural country in the early 19th _{century, with about 70 percent of the}

population living in rural areas, Venezuela witnessed massive urbanisation in the 20th

century, which resulted in only about 12 percent of the country’s population living in rural areas by the 1990s (Wilpert 2006). The two major reasons for this shift were inequitable land appropriations and emphasis on oil exploitation. In the 1920s, the contribution of agriculture to Venezuela’s gross domestic product was about one-third, which decreased to less than one- tenth by the 1950s, and to about one-seventeenth in 2005 (Wilpert 2005). The country

gradually became a huge importer of food; yet, with poverty as high as 70 percent in the late 1990s, food was not accessible to a large segment of the population (Beauregard & Gottlieb 2009; Lavelle 2014; McKay, Nehring & Walsh-Dilley 2014).

Venezuela has always had hugely unequal land ownership. In 1937, a mere 4.8 percent of land owners possessed land holdings of 1,000 hectares or more, which constituted 88.8 percent of all agricultural land, whereas 57.7 percent of all land owners were small farmers with land holdings of 10 hectares or less, which constituted only 0.7 percent of all

agricultural land (Wilpert 2006). To address this hugely unequal land ownership, Venezuela implemented an agricultural reform law in 1960. However, the law did not significantly alter

131 Venezuela’s land ownership pattern. In 1997, a mere 5 percent of land owners controlled 75 percent of the land, whereas 75 percent of the smallest land owners controlled only 6 percent of the land (Wilpert 2006).

Venezuela also adopted neoliberal economic policies in the 1980s and 1990s, which fanned then-existing popular discontent due to the perception that such policies widened the gap between the rich and the poor (Lavelle 2014). Such discontent owing to unequal land distribution, adoption of neoliberal economic policies, and the state’s neglect of the poor, provided fertile grounds for the rise of a socialist champion, Hugo Chávez, in 1998 (Kappeler 2013).

After Hugo Chávez was elected Venezuela’s President in 1998, he started the “Bolivarian Revolution” of which land and agricultural policy reforms were key components, and food sovereignty was adopted as the means to bring about those reforms (Beauregard & Gottlieb 2009). Chávez adopted a national policy of food sovereignty in 1999, making Venezuela the world’s first country to do so (Beauregard & Gottlieb 2009; Schiavoni 2015).

Venezuela’s Constitution does not explicitly contain the term “food sovereignty”.22 _It

contains several Articles related to agriculture and rural development, focusing on sustainable agriculture, secure food supply, strategic self-sufficiency in food, employment and well-being of the rural population, transformation of fallow land into productive units through tax laws, and providing land ownership to farmers and agricultural producers in accordance with the law (Box 6.1). This has been interpreted as the incorporation of food sovereignty elements in Venezuela’s Constitution (McKay, Nehring & Walsh-Dilley 2014).

132 Box 6.1: Articles related to agriculture and rural development in Venezuela’s

Constitution Article 305

The State shall promote sustainable agriculture as the strategic basis for overall rural development, and consequently shall guarantee the population a secure food supply, defined as the sufficient and stable availability of food within the national sphere and timely and uninterrupted access to the same for consumers. A secure food supply must be achieved by developing and prioritizing internal agricultural and livestock production, understood as production deriving from the activities of agriculture, livestock, fishing and aquiculture. Food production is in the national interest and is fundamental to the economic and social development of the Nation. To this end, the State shall promulgate such

financial, commercial, technological transfer, land tenancy, infrastructure, manpower training and other measures as may be necessary to achieve strategic levels of self-

sufficiency. In addition, it shall promote actions in the national and international economic context to compensate for the disadvantages inherent to agricultural activity.

The State shall protect the settlement and communities of non-industrialised fishermen, as well as their fishing banks in continental waters and those close to the coastline, as defined by law.

Article 306

The State shall promote conditions for overall rural development, for the purpose of generating employment and ensuring the rural population an adequate level of well-being, as well as their inclusion in national development. It shall likewise promote agricultural activity and optimum land use by providing infrastructure projects, supplies, loans, training services and technical assistance.

Article 307

The predominance of large land estates is contrary to the interests of society. Appropriate tax law provisions shall be enacted to tax fallow lands and establish the necessary measures to transform them into productive economic units, likewise recovering arable land. Farmers and other agricultural producers are entitled to own land, in the cases and forms specified under the pertinent law. The State shall protect and promote associative and private forms

133 of property in such manner as to guarantee agricultural production. The State shall see to the sustainable ordering of arable land to guarantee its food producing potential.

In exceptional cases, quasi-tax contributions shall be created to provide funds for financing, research, technical assistance, transfer of technology and other activities that promote the productivity and competitiveness of the agricultural sector. These matters shall be appropriately regulated by law.

Source: Venezuela (Bolivarian Republic of)’s Constitution of 1999 with amendments through 2009.

The kind of emphasis Venezuela’s Constitution has placed on agricultural and rural

development might be radical in view of the Venezuelan state’s decades-long neglect of the agriculture and rural sector due to the importance that Venezuela had given to urbanisation and the oil economy. But the measures for agricultural and rural development as stipulated in the Constitution are not beyond the scope of the concepts of food security and the right to food. Therefore, including these measures in Venezuela’s Constitution might have been less contested.

Venezuela made explicit mention of the term “food sovereignty” in its Organic Law of Agro- food Security and Sovereignty, which was approved in 2008 (McKay, Nehring & Walsh- Dilley 2014). According to McKay et al., of the various strategies that Venezuela adopted to implement food sovereignty, one was its state-led redistribution of agrarian reform

programme, which was oriented towards improving access to land, food and markets of the lower-rung populace. To implement agrarian reforms, and to provide Venezuelan farmers access to land through land reforms, Venezuela promulgated a land law in 2001 (Kappeler 2013; Lavelle 2014). The land law sought to ensure small farmers’ access to land by setting limits on the size of landholdings, taxing unused property, redistributing state-owned land to peasant families and cooperatives, expropriating illegally held land from the private sector, and recovering fallow land. The food sovereignty law also sought to ensure Venezuelans’ access to food and markets through the establishment of state-run food companies and food

134 banks that would respectively provide subsidised food and free meals to the needy (McKay, Nehring & Walsh-Dilley 2014).

The most important aspect of food sovereignty in Venezuela is the formation of local

institutions (i.e., the communal councils and comunas, or communes), which provide space to farmers to effectively participate in decision-making (McKay, Nehring & Walsh-Dilley 2014; Schiavoni 2015). However, these local institutions have been formed not only to enable decentralised and participatory decision-making processes in regard to food and agricultural issues, but in relation to every local developmental issue ranging from water and sewage management to infrastructure development. Therefore, the formation of the communal councils should not be limited to analysing the implementation of food sovereignty alone. They have been formed to follow the principles of participatory democracy, and recognising people’s sovereignty, in general.

In Venezuela, giving voice to the people through the communal councils in general, and devising programmes to provide access to land and to food and markets in particular, are not without contestation. There have been conflicts between capitalist elites and landless farmers in land redistribution programmes (Beauregard & Gottlieb 2009), and class conflicts in communal councils over development priorities (McKay, Nehring & Walsh-Dilley 2014). Overall, as Kappeler (2013) argues, the food sovereignty experiment in Venezuela is not in accordance with the promotion of food sovereignty by La Vía Campesina.

According to Kappeler (2013), the Venezuelan government expropriated large amounts of unused land, but provided only some of them to local peasants. It turned the rest of the farm “into an enterprise that followed all the logics and rationales of high modern capitalist farming” (Kappeler 2013, p. 11). The food sovereignty exercise in Venezuela does not demonstrate the peasant way of agriculture. What changed visibly in Venezuela with the implementation of food sovereignty was that the state took greater control of the food and

135 agricultural system (which, earlier, had largely been controlled by foreign entities), and Venezuela’s food import sources changed from its chief foes such as the United States and Colombia, to other regional states such as Argentina and Brazil. Venezuela adopted the idea of food sovereignty mainly in the sense of the nation’s capacity to feed its people, and hence it adopted a mixed approach of simultaneously promoting peasant agriculture and agricultural development based on a large-scale industrial model that made use of machinery, chemicals and petroleum-based fertilisers. This illustrated the differing narratives—national versus local—on food sovereignty.

Thus, in Venezuela, food sovereignty is not specified as a right, but as a broad framework, largely in the context of the nation’s historical neglect of the agriculture sector and elite capture of the sector. However, the idea of food sovereignty has not been adopted with a clear understanding. Whose sovereignty it is in food sovereignty that the state of Venezuela wants to safeguard has remained an intriguing question. The measures that Venezuela has adopted in bringing about agri-food reforms suggest there is no reason to assume that the concepts of food security and the right to food would bar Venezuela from taking these measures. It is difficult to state clearly from Venezuela’s food sovereignty experience what Venezuela wanted to address by adopting the idea of food sovereignty that it felt it could not address without adopting this new idea. Moreover, the food crisis seen in Venezuela in recent years has given critics reasons to question the adoption of food sovereignty by Venezuela as a better and alternative framework to implement reforms in the food and agriculture sector (Barbarani 2016).

6.3

Ecuador

As in the case of Venezuela and many other Latin American countries, there was huge inequality in land ownership in Ecuador (Beauregard & Gottlieb 2009; Peña 2016). In the large estates spanning thousands of hectares of land, Ecuador had adopted modern

136 (Beauregard & Gottlieb 2009). The agricultural estates were modelled along the lines of modern, industrial agriculture, with a focus on exports. Although modernising agriculture had some benefits initially, in later years there were more socio-environmental and economic problems such as large-scale soil erosion, loss of local genetic resources, decline in agro- biodiversity, pest problems and public health problems due to the use of pesticides, and centralisation of financial systems and markets that undermined terms of trade and fairness for growers as well as urban-based consumers (Arce, Sherwood & Paredes 2015). Despite large-scale agricultural development in the country, the food needs of the Ecuadorian people were met mainly through imports. More importantly, a large majority of farmers did not have access to land and credit to perform agricultural activities. Their rights, as well as the rights of indigenous people in Ecuador, in relation to access to land and natural resources and participation in decision-making, were not protected. Hence, farmers and indigenous people in Ecuador formed a coalition named La Mesa Agraria, emphasising food sovereignty (Beauregard & Gottlieb 2009). This coalition played an important role in incorporating food sovereignty in Ecuador’s 2008 Constitution (Wittman, Desmarais & Wiebe 2011).

Ecuador’s 2008 Constitution is based on the indigenous tradition of Sumak Kawsay, which means “good living” (Peña 2016). La Mesa Agraria advocated for food sovereignty as an essential element of good living (Giunta 2014). Accordingly, in the chapter on the “Rights of the good way of living” in the Constitution, it was stated, “The Ecuadorian State shall

promote food sovereignty” (Constitution of the Republic of Ecuador 2008). The term “food sovereignty” is not only mentioned in several places in the Constitution, but there is a separate chapter, Chapter Three in Title VI (Development structure), on food sovereignty. The first article of this chapter, Article 281, reads (Constitution of the Republic of Ecuador 2008),

137 Food sovereignty is a strategic objective and an obligation of the State in order to ensure that persons, communities, peoples and nations achieve self-sufficiency with respect to healthy and culturally appropriate food on a permanent basis.

Therefore, food sovereignty is explicitly associated with the strategic objective of attaining self-sufficiency in food at the personal, community, peoples and national levels, which the Ecuadorian state has to ensure. The Constitution has listed 14 measures through which the state can ensure food self-sufficiency as stated. These measures emphasise farmers’ access to land, credit and inputs, small- to medium-scale organic production, traditional farming methods, and so on. A directly relevant measure from the perspective of achieving self-

sufficiency stipulated in the Constitution, and which has not been explicitly stated by the food sovereignty literature in other instances, is adopting fiscal, tax and tariff policies to

discourage food imports and protect the national agri-food and fishing sectors. Moreover, the Constitution has also forbidden large estate-farming and concentration of land.

These constitutional provisions on food sovereignty signify the importance given by Ecuador to small and medium farmers, to traditional farming practices at smaller scales, and to

protecting national agri-food and fishing sectors. According to Peña (2016), it had been possible to have constitutional provisions on food sovereignty in Ecuador due to the emergence of new social movements, mainly the indigenous movement, that challenged neoliberalism and advocated for a radical redefinition of politics, which was adopting the idea of food sovereignty in relation to food and agricultural issues.

The social movement organisations in Ecuador gained access to influential legislative allies and political alignments, which allowed them to directly negotiate the principles of the food sovereignty regime of the Constitution (Giunta 2014; Peña 2016). On the other hand, the political parties of the right had lost significant electoral power, which resulted in the minimal influence of food retailers and agro-export industries on the outcome of the food sovereignty article of the Constitution (Peña 2016).

138 However, the coalition La Mesa Agraria, which had played a crucial role in getting “food sovereignty” included in the Constitution, could not include all the important elements of food sovereignty in the Constitution in accordance with the agreed principles of food sovereignty. This was vividly apparent in the case of genetically modified organisms

(GMOs), which the food sovereignty movement vehemently opposes. Ecuador’s Constitution declares that GMOs that are harmful to human health or that jeopardise food sovereignty or ecosystems will be forbidden, but this provision has been included with a caveat. An

exception has been built into Article 401 of the Constitution, which states, “in the interest of the nation as duly substantiated by the President of the Republic and adopted by the National Assembly” GMOs could be introduced into the country (Constitution of the Republic of Ecuador 2008). This suggests that some compromises were made in negotiating the principles of food sovereignty in Ecuador’s Constitution.

Ecuador’s President, Rafael Correa, himself publicly stated how the provision related to GMOs was included in the Constitution as a compromise. In his weekly address on 1 September 2012, he talked about GMOs (Arce, Sherwood & Paredes 2015). He referred to Article 401 of the Constitution that had declared Ecuador free of transgenic seeds and crops, and explained how that provision was built into the Constitution. He said (Arce, Sherwood & Paredes 2015, p. 137),

I remember when we discussed this in 2008. I was surrounded by the ‘blanket’ of Alberto Acosta (President of the National Constitutional Assembly) and he pulled out an article produced by himself. He said to me, this is over transgenics… I remember thinking to myself, my God, what a crazy idea [to place this in a constitution], but no one had anything to say. I thought to myself, what a fundamentalist idea: no to transgenics. I regret not having said [at the time], ‘Categorically no, this idea is a mistake!’

He went further and said that he was successful at least in building the exception into the Constitution, and informed the public that the country would see the proliferation of GMOs

139 in the days ahead. Since then, there has been a divide in Ecuador about GMOs, with the government carrying out an aggressive campaign in their favour, and many others, especially food activists, opposing them (Arce, Sherwood & Paredes 2015).

The President’s statement is clearly a sign of the Government of Ecuador trying to exercise sovereignty in making decisions related to the country’s national agro-food policy, as it deems useful, by ignoring the concerns of many Ecuadorian people. Such an exercise of food sovereignty augurs well with Giunta’s claim that Ecuador’s Constitution provides the

Ecuadorian people and communities the right to access to food, but lacks clarity on whether the Ecuadorian people and communities hold the right to make decisions on their agri-food systems and policies, which is fundamental to food sovereignty as conceptualised by La Vía Campesina (Giunta 2014).

Although the incorporation of food sovereignty in Ecuador’s Constitution was considered a feat initially by the social movements and their coalition, in due course it appeared that the measures to implement agri-food reforms to realise food sovereignty in Ecuador looked challenging. There were oppositions to the reform measures not only from anti-reform groups, but even from within the President’s own political party (Giunta 2014). There were contestations on land reform, and therefore, the land distribution policies and programmes did not progress as anticipated (Giunta 2014; McKay, Nehring & Walsh-Dilley 2014). Even the social movements that had formed the coalition and had played major roles in incorporating food sovereignty in the Constitution had serious differences regarding the specification of measures to implement food sovereignty. As a result, the Food Sovereignty Law (LORSA), which was approved by Ecuador’s National Assembly in 2009 to implement food sovereignty based on the measures stipulated in the Constitution, was prepared as a “law of mediation”. The President delivered a partial veto of the new law, by putting aside most of the sensitive issues, some of which were key, from a food sovereignty perspective (Giunta 2014; Wittman, Desmarais & Wiebe 2011).

140 The result of the concessions made by various quarters to arrive at a consensus to determine the sovereignty of food sovereignty in Ecuador was that they all agreed to food sovereignty