A step towards socialism: Land redistribution in Venezuela

Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez is taking privately owned idle farmland and creating farming cooperatives, as part of his plans to reduce the amount of food Venezuela imports and to construct a "socialist fatherland."

So far, opinions of the redistribution are predictably mixed, or at least you'd think so by reading New York Times. The landowners and the wealthy naturally hate it, but Chavez remains popular on the whole. The landowners make up a small minority of the total population (around 3% own 77% of the land, according to Greg Palast for commondreams.org), a fraction that is greatly overrepresented in the New York Times article, which offers four quotations by former landowners, and only two short quotations by co-op members.

The NYT article also reports that the plan for Venezuela to grow more of its own food may not be working and cites recent sugar shortages, even though a few paragraphs earlier in the article, it states that the co-ops are replanting sugar cane fields with crops that are more suitable for the area, like corn and manioc. The Times does not comment on whether production of those crops has increased or not.

Surprisingly, the Washington Post paints a clearer, if somewhat reluctant, picture of just how popular Chavez is in Venezuela, citing his "overwhelming re-election" in December and the modest economic headway he's made on reducing poverty and creating jobs.

I'll be interested in seeing not only how this story unfolds, but also in how the media chooses to cover it.