Yellow corn production increased in Venezuela despite the US blockade (Photo: INIA)
THE US ATTACK ON ESSENTIAL SUPPLIES FROM VENEZUELA IN 2020
Clara Sanchez
30 Nov 2020 , 10:06 am .
The Global Agricultural Information Network (GAIN) and the Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS) of the Department of Agriculture (USDA) updated the 2020/21 report for Venezuela in relation to its production agriculture, consumption, trade and applied policies, specifically for grains and forage crops.
In the new report, published in November 2020 , which ignores the sanctions, the persecution of PDVSA, the hope in low oil prices and the impact of the covid-19, they argue that, although production continues to decline, it is at a rate slower than initially anticipated, as "farmers find creative solutions to shortages of agricultural inputs and fuels."
In a previous report, they hoped that the country's scarcity of resources would be exacerbated and the state unable to "import fuel, buy basic products or maintain long-standing social programs at existing levels", as well as further stimulate "the scarcity of certified seeds and fertilizers ".
For, particularly in the time that elapses, "the fuel shortage" became "unmanageable" by the Venezuelan State, causing the national food production to fall precipitously and massively in 2020.
ENOUGH GASOLINE AND DIESEL TO KEEP OPERATING
As it should be remembered, the United States predicted for Venezuela since the beginning of the year, on the subject of agriculture, which in any case impacts the diet of the Venezuelan population, the "decrease in the production of most basic items", among these wheat, corn, rice and sorghum, due to the lack of agricultural inputs and other components, but, above all, due to the incorporation of the new horse for the unconventional war against Venezuela in 2020, the fuel, qualified as an accurate dart for the "precipitous and massive drop in production", stating among other things that "without fuel, tractors cannot be operated."
And it is that, if the coercive measures imposed on Venezuela and its oil industry, its partners and clients, were wreaking havoc on the domestic production of gasoline, considered insufficient by the government of Donald Trump to make the national government collapse, with the passage of the For some time the alerts were lit, even in sectors opposed to Nicolás Maduro , including in the Washington Office for Latin America ( WOLA ), when the possible end of the oil exemptions was announced , which included the trade in Venezuelan oil for diesel, the main fuel Both for the generation of electricity, and especially for transportation, on which the production of basic inputs such as food or medicine depends.
In this regard, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) recognizes that the government of Nicolás Maduro "was able to extend the supply of fuel, through a combination of refining imported Iranian gasoline and domestic diesel," therefore, "Updated production forecasts project that producers will have some continued access to inputs this year."
And, although initially, fuel shortages, for example, "forced farmers to choose between planting sorghum and other crops for human consumption"; or in sectors such as corn, producers "faced a massive shortage of fuel, fertilizers and agrochemicals in early 2020", causing "decreases in planted area and yields, which were expected to continue throughout the year"; finally, from those first forecasts, "the shortage is not as serious as it was initially anticipated."
In short, it is reaffirmed that it is thanks to "Iranian fuel shipments and a slight recovery in national refining that gave farmers enough gasoline and diesel to continue operating."
VENEZUELA'S DEPENDENCE ON IMPORTED WHEAT
On the specific issue of agricultural production, and particularly the consumption of wheat, of which Venezuela is highly dependent on imports, it is stated, it will not fall by 780 thousand metric tons, and although the fall with respect to previous years will continue, the It will reach 900 thousand tons, above the expected estimates.
Similarly, Venezuela will import one million metric tons of wheat in the 2020/21 season. Considering an increase of 225 thousand tons over the initial estimate of 775 thousand tons, due to the flexibilities granted to the private sector to import freely, which affects a recovery in imports, with a change in the pattern in imported products and, therefore , greater provision for consumers. However, they are still waiting for a complete liberalization of this market so that they increase.
It is precisely in this area that Venezuela becomes one of the main export destinations for the raw material of Cargill, a transnational company with a North American parent company that recently announced the sale of all its assets in the country and which, along with other companies, the national transnationalized and transnational oligopoly present in the Venezuelan agri-food system, with a dominant position over the food market of greater national consumption, among which are wheat flour and pasta, among others.
IT HAS THE MAIN ITEM OF THE NATIONAL DIET
Regarding corn production, an increase is estimated to 390 thousand metric tons or 110 thousand tons more than the official USDA forecast, whose increase is explained by an expansion of 30 thousand hectares of the planted area, together with a slight improvement in returns.
In this sense, it is indicated that more yellow corn was planted than white during the winter cycle of 2020, and that "total consumption for the 2020/21 campaign increased to 1,350 million metric tons. 4% above the USDA Official Forecast ".
Corn inventories higher than the average are also reported and even that large millers reported the fall in sales in April and May, which would correspond to the beginning of the pandemic in Venezuela, causing a subsequent accumulation of inventories, however, "the industry begins to normalize "; and in this case, the companies report storage of 100 thousand metric tons of yellow corn and about 250 thousand tons of white corn.
And in terms of international suppliers, it is considered that the United States continues to be a large supplier of yellow corn to Venezuela, while the majority of white corn imports come from Mexico.
RICE PLANTING DECREASES, YIELDS INCREASE
Regarding the planting of rice, it is maintained that the planted area would decrease to 55 thousand hectares, 8% less compared to 2019, due to the limited access to agricultural inputs, whose decrease will continue constant since 2014.
However, one element stands out: the increase is estimated to 130 thousand metric tons, corresponding to 25 thousand tons above the initial USDA forecast, particularly due to increases in yields in the current year, which makes them suggest that estimate.
And although it is only considered that it is due to the additional access to fertilizers, abundant rainfall and better control of pests and diseases in the current season, and there are no official public data, this forecast could correspond to the planting of rice of the ViVe variety , an early variety developed thanks to the Vietnam-Venezuela Agreement that allows, in less than 100 days, the yield of 6 thousand kilos of rice per hectare, particularly from ViVe 80 and ViVe 95 seeds .
In this same area, the increase in consumption is estimated from 20 thousand metric tons to 620 thousand tons, due to the improvement in production and, of course, supply.
Regarding rice imports, they are estimated at 450 thousand metric tons, which is 10 thousand tons, below the official USDA forecast, coming mainly from Brazil.
On the other hand, there is a warning about a new element in relation to rice, referred to negative profit margins for farmers, which is discouraging growth in the area in relation to the purchase price.
In this case, domestic rice producers indicate that they cannot compete with imported rice at a lower cost. This would reinforce the action of the national government with the imposition of the 20% tariff on the importing agro-industry on the types of paddy rice, white in bulk, packed, flour, by-products and other rice derivatives; This industry has already anticipated the increase in production costs and, therefore, consumer prices.
However, the USDA recognizes that the national government continues to be the largest buyer of domestic and imported rice for distribution through the CLAP (Local Supply and Production Committees) system.
SORGHUM FOR ANIMAL PRODUCTION
For sorghum, it is still forecast that 2020/21 production will fall to 15 thousand metric tons, as well as consumption will be reduced in the same proportion due to scarce inputs, in an item that is used as a source of food for the poultry industries and porcine, which is lately being replaced in animal feed by yellow corn.
Remember that Venezuela does not import or export sorghum. It imported seeds for sowing mainly from the United States, through the exclusivity that Agroisleña had; after their nationalization, these imports fell to zero.
NEW ACTORS PIERCE THE BLOCKADE AGAINST VENEZUELA: TURKEY AND IRAN
On the other hand, the report continues to highlight the presence of Venezuela's new commercial partners.
This is how he refers that new imported wheat products are appearing in the monthly deliveries of the CLAP food subsidy program, among which are mostly Turkish pasta.
This shows the presence of a new actor in the supply of food to Venezuela, which according to its commercial data shows a "rebound in imports of flour and pasta, and Turkey sends most of both."
In fact, it is said that in recent months "increasing volumes of pasta and flour have arrived in Venezuela from Turkey," whose imported products have a lower cost than similar products made in the country. In this case, it is necessary to clarify that the raw material used in the Venezuelan milling industry in the manufacture of the products is completely imported.
For this reason, the notable increase in Venezuelan imports of processed wheat products, since mid-2019, stands out, with Turkey now becoming the largest supplier of flour and pasta for Venezuela. Although the increases in flour imports from Brazil and Colombia are also being monitored during fiscal year 2020.
And as if that were not enough, the new supermarket chain Megasis is mentioned, which also sells Iranian-brand flour and pasta in Venezuela.
Therefore, it is considered that "the regime continues to rely on non-traditional trading partners, such as Iran, Turkey and Russia, for certain basic products", and in the particular case of Iran, with fuel.
FINAL THOUGHTS
These new trade partners, among which Turkey, Iran, Russia and China stand out, are actors of strategic importance for Venezuela, in this phase of application of the policy of "regime change" that the United States is advancing against the country, and therefore Therefore, with their alliances, they have constituted a brake on the economic, financial and commercial blockade, which gives greater freedom of action in the immediate term to the Bolivarian Revolution, above the estimates of foreign intervention and everything that is behind the siege of the country North American to the Venezuelan agri-food sector in 2020.
And it is that the use of fuel as an essential component for the scenario of conflict between the United States against Venezuela, in order to make the national production of food fall massively and precipitously, is an example of unconventional war, a simultaneous attack or " war in parallel ", where only by resorting to the theory of the Five Rings of Power of John Warden III, colonel of the US Air Force , and its adaptation to the Six Rings, in order to advance in the weakening of the central power, This action of preventing the supply of gasoline or diesel can be explained to exacerbate all the vulnerabilities that lead to strategic paralysis or the inaction of the national government.
In this sense, the implementation of the simultaneous attack on essential elements of production, among which are food, was visualized, affecting the logistics infrastructure and its connections, the population and agriculture, beyond the military forces. , to get to the first ring of power; mainstreamed by the importance of energy for the war effort, regrouping factors such as electricity and fuel, and incorporating it in a new ring of power (sixth) that cuts through all the others, and strips all vulnerabilities.
It is not enough to consider food as an essential supply corresponding to the second ring, it is also necessary to affirm that the agri-food system is part of the main infrastructure within the third ring, which in turn can affect the rest, among which are the population and the armed forces. If it is also crossed by the sixth energy ring (see image), the forecasts that Venezuela faced in 2020 were not less, only on the food issue.
(see diagram at link)
And while it is assumed that production estimates will improve because producers have some continuous access to inputs and fuels this year, although far from total insurance; The truth is that they reacted quickly with the relaunch of the Great AgroVenezuela Mission.
On the other hand, Donald Trump lost the elections in the United States without specifying the policy of "regime change" in Venezuela, at the same time that the exemptions to its oil companies in Venezuelan territory are extended from the North American country, until next month of June, and the Bolivarian Revolution remains standing, hand in hand with the government of Nicolás Maduro.
However, let's get ready for the 2021 battle on the agri-food issue: let's wait for the hungry enemy, with our troops well fed.
https://misionverdad.com/investigacione ... la-en-2020
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WHY IN 2021 THEY WON'T BE ABLE TO OVERTHROW US EITHER
Jose Roberto Duque
The Venezuelan resistance does not diminish in strength (Photo: Luis Morillo)
27 Nov 2020 , 10:07 am .
First, there is a review of the mechanism that connects the natural rebellion of the oppressed peoples with the desire to change course, strategy or simply government.
Preaching or speaking against the government, or against governments, is an easy matter, a more or less natural reaction or position; "Even biological," someone said, referring to youth. It could be said, therefore, that the anti-government factors tend to have an easy time proselytizing when the people are "going through work", when their condition as a looted collective subject becomes unbearable. Nothing more elementary than to tell people, politicized or not, that their sufferings are the fault or responsibility of whoever "is in power."
As during two centuries of republican history people got used to the idea that "the Government" is the depositary and executor of "power", the canonical idea that overthrowing one government and installing another is the only or the most effective way for things to go better. The cases or governments of Allende, Fidel, Chávez, Jacobo Arbenz, and others have sufficiently demonstrated that this parallel or equation is not automatically true. The government is not always or has the power; being anti-government is not always being anti-power. Will it be necessary to indicate to the anti-Maduro speeches, "but from the left" how similar is their preaching to that of the Anglo-Saxon hegemonic power?
***
Many decades ago, Marx and the Marxists placed a crucial idea on the table of analysis: what needs to be changed is not the government (any one), but the system. Among many other readings, that statement or postulate supports and verifies the following verification of the concrete and immediate world: you have a Venezuela trying to do a socialist experiment or something similar, but that Venezuela is surrounded by factors of sabotage and disturbance, then that Venezuela does not it will not easily succeed in a short time to make its anticapitalist experiment prosper. Why? Because around you there are only pieces and mechanisms that will force you to continue depending on capital. No oxygen bubble survives surrounded by helium or nitrogen; no socialist experiment has it easy if it is surrounded and harassed by promoters of liberalism and capital. A polite way to navigate that awkward premise is to assume that socialism under construction must be financed by capitalism. The dying man must finance his gravedigger. With what? Well with dollars.
Let's get crawling: in Venezuela the dollar has emerged as the hegemon and paradigm, not because Maduro wants it, but because as long as the only system with universal voation is capitalism anchored to the dollar, there is no way to do without the dollar.
And let's stop bullshitting: there are no socialist currencies, there is no communist exchange value or anti-power: dollar, crypto assets, gold, rubles, yuan, whatever arises: everything is the work of capital in crisis or in mutation.
***
Such is the context. Let's land now on the subject, which is the verification of what appears in the next sections of this rugged road that Venezuelans travel.
For a violent overthrow to take place, a simultaneous conjunction of factors is necessary:
Generalized popular discontent;
Mass detection and understanding of the origin of disturbances and discontent;
Generalized attack on the currency, the economy and the flow of energy resources;
Activation of a leadership or vanguard capable of channeling that discontent in the face of an uprising;
Incorporation of living and active forces to the process of insurgency, conspiracy or insurgent movement;
International support for the overthrow plan;
Weakness, isolation or cracking of the factors that support the Government and the institutions.
The squalid have managed to make several of these factors coincide in time, but not all. In that dramatic April of Chávez it seemed that everything was coming together, but in the street there was a people who shouted "with hunger and without a job, with Chávez I am resisting." And also the military establishment was already impregnated and penetrated by the Bolivarian Chavista spirit. That is why the overthrow was born, but he died as a neonate: as in Bolivia, it was an artificial, unsustainable and unsupported coup in the crowd.
LEADERS WILL ALWAYS BE MISSING
The Venezuelan right has in its favor, entering the third decade of the XXI, with several of the necessary requirements to crown an overthrow, but fails in some fundamental requirements: leadership with credibility or roots in the people, identification of the people with the idea of overthrow as a solution and synchronization of factors.
There have been moments of deep depression and discontent, like that disastrous year that was 2016. It was a stage-moment that seemed decisive and propitious for a direct attack that would have been lethal. The fascist leadership reacted out of time: "Exit II" took place in 2017, probably because the resources arrived late, or the street device of the conspiracy was activated late. In the absence of a genuine popular movement Popular Will and the State Department bought something that looked remotely like it, a handful of fierce neighborhood boys who carried out spectacular actions in exchange for a salary, along with alienated elements that put the criminal touch on it. and murderer to street actions. All this when the effects of the shortage had already been moderately controlled;
Nor did the conspiracy have effective support from any operative faction within the Armed Forces. They also bought elements that gave the impression of dislocation or fracture of the military establishment, but those elements taken from the sleeve did not generate any multiplying or propagating effect.
A year and a half later there was the mental collapse of Trump and his environment, and the well-known blockade recipe and threats from satellite governments grouped in a ghostly "Lima Group." But the rest was missing: the people and the military. There was an experiment of communion of these elements in the border Cúcuta, or a propaganda simulacrum that made many say: "now it has turned on." The episode had neither bellows nor a vocation for propagation. We must insist: if all this had come together in a situation like that of 2016, the neo-Nazis would probably have been successful.
Heading to 2021: Trump is gone, although a worse subject has probably arrived at the White House and the destruction devices of the empire.
There is still no leadership in the anti-Chavista opposition capable of mobilizing or at least agitating broad sectors of the population after a project of liquidation or extermination of Chavistas and Chavismo as current.
A significant segment of the Venezuelan military world openly folded or willing to bow to the calls and incitement to the coup has still not manifested.
The process of dissolution, dismemberment or effective bankruptcy of the United States satellite governments in Central and South America continues.
Nicolás Maduro has proven to be the most solid of the continent's anti-hegemonic leaders; Of the characters that 18 months ago seemed to be about to destroy him personally, and Venezuela as an anti-capitalist experiment, today only Duque and Bolsonaro persist as threats.
There are signs of a weakening of the blocking and persecution mechanisms for any company and country that does business with Venezuela, which may mean a respite in the medium term in terms of access of Venezuelans to goods and resources.
Whatever the result of the election of parliamentarians on December 6, everything indicates that this exercise of sovereignty will heal the wounds that had sprouted in our institutionality.
In conclusion: it may be that in the year 2021 the forms of harassment and attack against the Revolution, against the government and against the people of Venezuela will persist and even be perfected (by the way, it will be necessary to speak again about the difference between these three elements of our historical Process), but after having survived (and more: having triumphed) the dreadful years 2016, 2019 and 2020, it seems that we will have a good opportunity to rehydrate, gain momentum, regroup, establish new strategies and new alliances and programs with a fresh head the battles of the future.
https://misionverdad.com/opinion/por-qu ... errocarnos
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