Venezuelan Farmers Struck by Hurricane Hugo
Hugo Chavez, that is. It's not the kind of agriculture story that leads to 10,000 word alt-weekly cover stories with titles like "Harvest of Shame." And it's a story so old in its principles and implications it's a shame indeed that people still have to write it. Still, when it comes to socialism, Venezuelan bossman Hugo Chavez is a slow learner.
These should be the best of times for dairy farmer Luis Espinoza. The Venezuelan economy is booming, thanks to a flood of oil dollars, and consumer demand for food items including milk and cheese is unprecedented. Overall consumption by Venezuelans is up 10% this year, and vendors of cars, clothing, computers and many other goods are raking it in.
But things couldn't be much worse for….hundreds of ranchers and farmers…..here in the northeastern state of Monagas. Espinoza's herd is dwindling, his milk output is shrinking and his future is more tenuous by the day.
He is a casualty of President Hugo Chavez's Socialism for the 21st Century….Chavez's policies are squeezing out private farms in favor of worker-owned cooperatives that enjoy massive government subsidies and for which profits are of secondary importance.
Espinoza's problem is he cannot produce milk at the low price—50 cents a liter—that the Chavez government has set for it. Nor can most private ranchers. Milk is one of 29 basic food items on which Chavez has slapped price controls. Others include cooking oil, flour, canned tuna, eggs, beef and poultry. Espinoza and other producers complain that the artificially low prices are leading them to ruin.
The story notes, as Mises noted nearly 90 years ago, that socialism's ill effects on society and culture go beyond the economic.
The lifelong rancher says he is under more than just economic pressure. In Venezuela's increasingly polarized society, he says, for-profit farmers are made to feel like villains.
"The worst is the psychological impact of the uncertainty and the political confrontations," said Espinoza, 54, as he walked among a cluster of cows from his 600-head herd, down from 900 seven years ago. "There are hatreds and passions and family conflicts that didn't exist before."
Michael Moynihan on Chavez and his enablers. David Weigel on why Latin American leftism isn't a mortal threat to the U.S.