Chavez to nationalize more land in Venezuela

Caracas, Agency
President Hugo Chavez said over the weekend that this month his government will expropriate some 250,000 hectares (617,000 acres) of supposedly idle land in three Venezuelan states as part of a "new offensive" in the fight against vast landholdings.

"We're accelerating the agrarian revolution" and to do that, lands in the western regions of "Lara, Apure and Zulia" will be "intervened right now in October," Chavez said during his weekly show on Sunday.

"The total area of the operation in October will be 250,000 hectares (617,000 acres), to be intervened by the National Land Institute, or INTI, Land Minister Juan Carlos Loyo said.

"In November it will be double...and in 2011, full speed ahead!" Chavez said, adding that the plan of his socialist "revolution" is to mount "a new offensive" in his determination to boost the nation's food production.

Chavez also announced the expropriation of the Venezuelan company Agroisleña, dedicated to the distribution and sale of agrochemical products and which has facilities in several states around the country, business sources said.

"Agroisleña is expropriated, come to me for I have flowers... Agroisleña's time is up, from now on it will be the property of the people. I'm calling on its owners to get in touch with the government," Chavez said.

The president also repeated his decision to nationalize the so-called English Company, of British capital, that has nine cattle ranches in Venezuela with a total area of 200,000 hectares (494,000 acres).

"All the lands of the so-called English Company are being nationalized now, I don't want any more delays," Chavez, who announced the expropriation of those lands in 2005, said.

Chavez said last August that he was going to purchase "hundreds of thousands of hectares (acres)" of the nine ranches belonging to the English Company, with which he had reached a "friendly agreement."

The president declared "war on big landowners" in 2004 and, according to the official information available, the government expropriated in 2009 a total of 500,000 hectares (1.2 million acres) of land that was either unproductive or whose ownership was not verifiable, in order "to guarantee its social use" in compliance with the National Agricultural Plan.

The opposition decries the expropriations, considering them illegal, and criticizes the government's agricultural policy, which it describes as destructive, seeing that 60 percent of Venezuelans' food supply now depends on imports.

The National Assembly, which is controlled by the ruling party, approved in June a reform of the Land Law which introduced a ban on the leasing out of agricultural land and, where that exists, authorizes a government takeover of the land for the direct production and distribution of food products.