Russia could have a stake in Venezuela's banana plantations~
A report in the Russian daily Kommersant has confirmed what was already public knowledge: that the Russians will set up business on the productive farms in the Sur de Lago region of Lake Maracaibo that the Hugo Chávez administration illegally confiscated overnight.
According to Kommersant, the Russian banana magnate, Vladimir Kejman, and the Venezuelan state-owned Corporación Venezolana de Alimentos (CVAL, S.A.) plan to set up a joint company to “manage” more than half the plantain plantations in Venezuela (20,000 hectares). It was also revealed that Kejman is the main shareholder of JFC, a company that owns banana plantations in Ecuador and Costa Rica and is the main supplier of bananas to the Russian market.
In other circumstances, VenEconomy would applaud the government’s initiative of attracting foreign investors to Venezuela. It would be a pleasure, for example, if it were to bring in experts from other parts of the world to provide technical assistance in order to increase the productivity, yield, and quality of this important crop, which is consumed practically daily in Venezuelan homes.
But there is nothing to celebrate when, in order to fulfill trade agreements that the Venezuelan government has signed with Russia (its main supplier of weapons, to boot), the property rights of dozens of Venezuelans are violated. There is nothing to applaud in a government that brings in Russian investment at the expense of throwing the farmers of Lake Maracaibo’s Eastern Shore off land, where the majority of them have invested time and money and been producing for more than 50 years and some whose families have been working the land there for more than 100.
It has been amply proven that these farms are fully productive, that they are supplying the domestic market and that there is even surplus for export, and that, besides, they are a major source of jobs in the region.
That makes the government’s handing over Venezuelan land where Venezuelans were investing and producing to a foreigner company even more reprehensible. And even more reprehensible still is the fact that the President himself, before grabbing the farms in Sur del Lago and revealing the ugly side of this sell-out, boasted to the Russians that “in Sabaneta, in Barlovento, and in Sur del Lago, we have land for those crops and we will do the same with coffee and cacao. Taking those products to the Black Sea is as far or as near as taking them to Buenos Aires. These are ways of diversifying our economy,” when signing the banana swap agreement in November.
new link:
Latin American Herald Tribune - VenEconomy: The Venezuela Banana Swap
Plantation in the Sur de Lago region of Lake Maracaibo,Venezuela
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