Corporate Power vs. Popular Power in the Politics of Food in Venezuela

Abstract

This article is an inquiry into the politics of food in Venezuela, addressing the question: What do food politics tell us about broader forms, organizations, and relations of power in Venezuela today? By digging into the past, it sheds light on the challenges and opportunities at present, examining: a) The ways in which food, through its material and symbolic power, has served as a vehicle for processes of social differentiation along lines of race, class, and gender – processes which continue to evolve into the present; b) The interplay of global and national food politics and the ways in which these connect to and play out at the level of everyday life; and c) How the contours of the Venezuelan food system have been shaped by the pushes and pulls of state, society, and capital over time, in a delicate balance of forces characterized by both deep tensions and deep ties.

Keywords

Venezuela Food sovereignty Authoritarian populism Food politics Social movements

From 2013 to 2014, what appeared as temporary shortages of key staple foods in Venezuela (endured periodically over past decades) took a different turn. Rather than dissipating over time, the shortages intensified and persisted, prompting long lines outside supermarkets that captured headlines across the globe. As the shortages extended into 2017, a mainstream narrative surrounding them crystalized: The lines were the result of overall scarcity facing the nation due to misguided socialist-oriented policies implemented over the course of the Bolivarian Revolution, which had been propped up by high oil prices and the charismatic appeal of former president Hugo Chávez Frías. Amid the perfect storm of Chávez’s death in 2013, the 2014 collapse of global oil prices, and the government’s misguided policies, Venezuela had steadily slid into a state of economic and political disintegration, with food and other necessities growing scarce, sparking social unrest as the people took to the streets.

Strikingly, the same narrative that abounded in mainstream news outlets appeared in academic literature as well, including among those identified with the political left. This coincided with a growing interest in what has been framed as “authoritarian populism” (see, e.g., Scoones et al., 2018), a conceptualization into which Venezuela, by the above account, has appeared to neatly fit. Such framing, furthermore, has extended beyond Venezuela to most Latin American countries that elected progressive governments through popular mobilizations over the past two decades, often referred to in Northern academia as “Pink Tide governments.” For Edelman (2020: 1430), the rise of authoritarian populism in Venezuela, though the “degeneration” of “Chavez’s Bolivarian Revolution,” represents the ultimate crumbling of the Pink Tide. Other scholars have termed this perceived trend the “end of the progressive cycle” in Latin America (e.g., Arsel, Hogenboom, and Pellegrini, 2016). Key to such framing is the concept of “extractivism,” or “neoextractivism” in the context of the Pink Tide governments, referring to the funding of social programs through extractive industries such as petroleum exploitation and mining. According to Edelman (2020: 1432), this is the Pink Tide’s “Achilles heel.” Through these mutually reinforcing concepts, an equation of sorts has begun to emerge in the literature, along the lines of Pink Tide government + (neo)extractivism = authoritarian populism.

While the above overview offers much to unpack, our main critique of these interlinked framings can be boiled down to two key points. The first is that that those ostensibly at the heart of concerns around populism(s) – the poor, Indigenous, Afro-descendent, and mestizo majorities that brought each of the respective “Pink Tide” governments into power, and whose emancipatory political projects extend far beyond any single political regime – are all but made invisible, their agency all but erased. Indeed, returning to Venezuela, who are “the people” in the predominant narrative? What, if any, are the impacts of present challenges on various sectors of society, and similarly, how are these sectors responding? How do race, class, and gender dynamics play out? Such questions are largely obscured in the authoritarian populism literature.

Second, in its focus positioning a particular government regime (and within it, a particular leader) vis-à-vis the general populace, much of the authoritarian populism literature – certainly in the case of Latin America – fails to give adequate attention to the role of the state-capital relations far predating any given regime and to situate these in broader world-historical processes. North-South power relations dating back to colonization are often under-addressed as well. That is, a deeper structural analysis is missing.

This article addresses some of these omissions in recent accounts of Venezuela. We do so by situating the current challenges in Venezuela in their historical context, and by sharing insights into the present from our research and lived experience. Our positionality is not only that of scholars but also of grassroots activists embedded in some of the movements and struggles at the heart of the Bolivarian Revolution. That we are females and feminist scholars and activists, two of us both Venezuelan and Afro-Venezuelan, are additional factors shaping our positionality and our sensitivity to underrepresented voices and perspectives.

As food has factored heavily in the predominant narratives surrounding Venezuela – particularly food lines, shortages, and purported “food riots” – the following analysis focuses on food politics as a key arena in which the country’s broader politics play out. Specifically, we address: What do food politics tell us about broader forms, organizations, and relations of power in Venezuela today, and with what implications for emancipatory alternatives? In so doing, we offer a lens of food, described in the next section, as a framework for teasing out the complex power relations at play in Venezuela, past to present.

Food As An Analytical Lens

Uniting the various strands of this analysis is our use of food as an analytical lens. Following Figueroa’s conception of food as “an ensemble of relations, a kind of nexus in and through which social processes at varied spatial and temporal scales converge and interact” (Figueroa, 2015: 502, emphasis in the original), we identify three areas of focus: 1) The multiple dimensions and functions of food; 2) The use of food as a tool of subjugation and control and, conversely, as a tool of resistance; and 3) Food as a nexus of both micro-level and macro-level processes.

The first is an eye to what McMichael (2000: 21) describes as food’s “material and symbolic functions.” These two facets of food interact to shape social identities and divisions in a variety of ways. As Mintz and Du Bois (2002: 109) have noted, “Like all culturally defined material substances used in the creation and maintenance of social relationships, food serves both to solidify group membership and to set groups apart.” This brings us to the second focus area. Both the material and symbolic functions of food may be drawn upon for the exertion of control over a given population, in forms both overt and subtle. At the same time, and in a relational manner, food may be “at the center of a liberatory agenda” (White, 2017: 33), as exemplified in the concept of food sovereignty and the movements advancing it. Food has thus been used over time as a tool of both subjugation and resistance, the pushes and pulls of which help to shape the broad contours of agrifood politics over time and in a given context. From the third focus area, we observe these processes converge in everyday life, through what Figueroa (2015: 498) describes as “everyday food practices.” The realm of everyday life is often subject to control and coercion, even as it is a particularly fertile ground for alternative-building.

A helpful tool for situating everyday food practices within broader global processes and relations is “food regime analysis” (FRA) (see McMichael, 2009). FRA periodizes the history of the past century and a half, examining food politics both within relatively stable periods of capital accumulation governed by particular (implicit) sets of rules and relations, as well as periods of transition and instability. We draw from FRA to situate developments in Venezuela within a broader world-historical context, analyzing how patterns established over time – from Spanish colonization, when Venezuela was a source of raw goods for luxury items for Europe, through the early decades of democratization and nation-building, when demand for imported foods by an increasingly urban population was met with an abundance of cheap wheat and durable goods from the U.S., through the mass privatization of food provisioning infrastructure at the start of the neoliberal era – continue to play a role in food politics to this day.

The sections of this article are organized chronologically by period, with an eye to the interaction of material and symbolic functions of food vis-à-vis social relations of production and consumption, particularly along lines of race, class, and gender; the interplay of macro- and micro-level processes; and the shifting relations of state, society and capital over time. The intention is not to offer a comprehensive historical account, but to highlight key processes that have shaped Venezuelan food politics over time.

The Colonial Period And Continuation Of Colonial Patterns

Venezuela’s main link to the first food regime, which “combined colonial tropical imports to Europe with basic grains and livestock imports from settler colonies, provisioning emerging European industrial classes” (McMichael, 2009: 141), was in the export of raw tropical goods to Europe. During the period of Spanish colonization from the sixteenth into the nineteenth centuries, a “tropical plantation economy based on slave labor” gave rise to a powerful agroexportation complex through which primarily cacao and later coffee were supplied to Europe and Mexico (Andrews, 1985: 12). A main feature of this system was the “plantation-conuco binomial,” in which familial and communal plots called conucos served as a source of subsistence for the enslaved and later low-wage labor forces of the haciendas of the colonial elite (Ríos de Hernández and Prato, 1990). The conucos of the haciendas represented a melding of Indigenous and African crops and growing practices, a common though underrecognized trend throughout the Americas (Carney, 2016). Conucos generally consisted of a diverse polyculture including tubers, legumes, fruits, and vegetables, with corn and cassava among the most important staples. A popular form of corn preparation was the arepa, a patty prepared from a dough of finely ground corn (Amodio, 2017).

Venezuela was among the first countries in the region to achieve independence, followed by the abolition of slavery by 1854, both through popular rebellion. Most social and economic patterns established under colonization, however, were little altered (Andrews, 1985). The plantation economy lasted for another century, while foreign trade switched hands from the Spanish crown to a commercial bourgeoisie descended from English, Germans, Dutch, French, and Italians, among others (Banko, 2010).¹

Across this period, the plantation-conuco binomial gave rise to patterns of dietary differentiation, with those who labored on the plantations feeding themselves through their own production, while the colonial elite (and, later, the European-descended bourgeoisie) maintained European culinary patterns, relying in part on imported goods. This dietary differentiation was intricately linked with questions of identity and domination, serving to maintain European descendants as distinct from and superior to the rest of the Indigenous, Afro-descendent, and mestizo majority. Such sentiments are reflected in the remark of a Spanish general that he could “handle anything on this earth except for those wretched corn cakes they call arepas, that have only been made for stomachs of blacks and ostriches” (Quintero Saravia, 2005: 318).

Colonizers’ disdain for Indigenous foodways, however, was paradoxically coupled with dependency on them. Indigenous knowledge proved essential for the adaptation of European crops to tropical agroecosystems, and food from conucos served as a vital source of sustenance. Over time, Indigenous foods increasingly made their way into the everyday diets of European-descended Venezuelans, albeit selectively and conditionally. Dietary differentiation was not altogether imposed from above, furthermore, as seen when the leader of an Indigenous uprising in 1871 called on his people to reject Spanish foods and culture, particularly white bread (Amodio, 2017).

The Modernization Period

Venezuela’s food system would undergo a major reordering with the rise of its petroleum industry in the 1920s, as an exodus from the countryside and influx into cities prompted a turn to imports just as the U.S. was seeking new markets for its agricultural surplus. Simultaneously, Venezuela’s remaining agricultural sector underwent a rapid modernization process, spurred by a confluence of national and international developments. Such events arguably thrusted Venezuela into the “second food regime” (1950s-1970s), which “re-routed flows of (surplus) food from the United States to its informal empire of postcolonial states on strategic perimeters of the Cold War” while promoting agro-industrialization based on “Green Revolution technologies, and instituting land reform to dampen peasant unrest and extend market relations into the countryside” (McMichael, 2009: 141). Through the course of these events, the dietary differentiation established under colonization would at once be reinforced and reshaped, including through the emergence of a middle class drawn largely along racial lines.

In 1929, the U.S. stock market crash and associated fall in agricultural commodity prices, together with the rise of petroleum in Venezuela as an export commodity, spelled the end of the agroexportation period as several new patterns rapidly emerged (Banko, 2010; Ríos de Hernández and Prato 1990). One was a flight of capital from agriculture to the emerging petroleum industry, with concessions granted mostly to the same wealthy families of the agroexportation complex (Mcbeth, 1983). This was accompanied by mutually reinforcing processes of proletarianization and urbanization, as rural inhabitants sought waged labor in growing commercial and service industries in urban hubs. These new workers, however, were met with insufficient sources of employment and infrastructure, leading to a surge in urban poverty (Araujo, 2013; Wilpert, 2006). The development of the petroleum sector also gave rise to a middle class of professional workers. In response to these changes, the families behind the former agroexport complex took advantage of existing infrastructure, an inflow of oil dollars, and the newly acquired purchasing power of Venezuela’s emerging middle class to shift from exportation to importation, giving rise to a powerful agrifood importation and distribution complex inextricably linked with petroleum extraction (Ríos de Hernández and Prato, 1990).

Petroleum thus served as an energetic surplus to break the plantation-conuco binomial, rupturing production and consumption patterns. Henceforth, food security became a main concern of each successive administration, from dictatorship through democratic transition. A key development filling the void left by petroleum in the countryside was Venezuela’s agricultural modernization program, starting in the late 1930s. By 1935, Venezuela had become a net food importer (Tinker Salas, 2015a). As securing an adequate national food supply was a pressing need, there was interest in revamping the agricultural sector to compensate for a lack of manpower in the countryside through modern technology, along with a new and “improved” rural workforce. This period was also in the run-up the Green Revolution that would soon sweep across Latin America and much of the Global South as part of an anti-communist Cold War strategy by the U.S. and allies (Patel, 2013).

The Green Revolution was personally ushered into Venezuela by U.S. “missionary capitalist” to Latin America, Nelson Rockefeller (Rivas, 2002). As the site of Standard Oil’s most profitable regional affiliate, Venezuela held a special place in the interests of Rockefeller, who established his own personal hacienda there. Rockefeller’s vision was to bring U.S.-style industrial farming and food distribution to the country to “transform Venezuela from a petroleum-dependent autarky with a restive peasantry into a reliable U.S. ally with a diversified economy and a solidly middle-class electorate” (Hamilton, 2011: 1). In addition to working with the newly democratic Venezuelan government to implement market-based agrarian reform to quell peasant unrest and introduce new agricultural technologies from the U.S., Rockefeller instituted Venezuela’s first supermarket chain, CADA, supplied largely by U.S. imports. Further solidifying the connections between food consumption, identity, and social status forged since colonization, supermarkets served as a vehicle for the newly emerging middle class to have a taste of food elitism, literally and figuratively.

Another key component of the agricultural modernization process was blanqueamiento (whitening) efforts. The Immigration and Colonization Law of 1936 facilitated the entrance of white Europeans into Venezuela, intended, in the words of the then-agricultural minister, for Venezuela to “diversify its agriculture; develop new industries and perfect existing ones; and contribute to the improvement of its race and the elevation of its culture” (Ramos Rodríguez, 2010: 94). Toward these ends, the law supported the formation of aptly named “colonias agrícolas” (agricultural colonies) of European immigrants on some of the country’s most productive agricultural land (Kritz, 1975; Ramos Rodríguez, 2010). The whitening process continued under Pérez Jiménez, who ruled by dictatorship from 1952-1958. Approximately one million immigrants, the majority of them Europeans, entered Venezuela in this period (Kritz, 1975). This contributed to the growth of an overwhelmingly white Venezuelan middle class, including a rural white middle class of producers engaged in capital-intensive practices.

Modernization yielded mixed results in bolstering the domestic food supply, and Venezuela remained a net food importer. By the late 1950s, wheat was a key import. Although wheat consumption had been reserved for Europeans and Euro-descendants since colonial times, from 1958 onward a steady supply of cheap wheat from the U.S. made it commonplace in the diet of urban Venezuelans, overtaking corn as the top-consumed staple grain by the early 1960s. However, wheat’s reign over corn only lasted until 1966, when corn overtook wheat in the form of harina precocida de maiz (precooked corn flour) (Carbonell and Rothman, 1977). As a white and ultra-refined version of corn, pre-cooked corn flour resembled the wheat flour Venezuelans had grown accustomed to. It also represented a melding of modernity and tradition, as it was largely destined for the arepa, while dramatically reducing its preparation time. Pre-cooked corn flour soon became the principal staple of Venezuela’s poor working class, representing eighty-eight percent of all corn consumed in the country (Abreu and Ablan, 2004).

Since the first commercialization of precooked corn flour, one brand, Harina P.A.N., has been synonymous with the product. Despite the humble origins portrayed in the product’s marketing, its owners, the Mendoza Fleury family, come from a long lineage extending from the colonial elite (McBeth, 1983; Araujo, 2013). Today, they are among the most powerful families in the country and best known as the owners of Empresas Polar, suppliers of the most widely consumed foods and beverages in Venezuela. Polar is the largest private company in Venezuela, its products reaching global markets, and is the Venezuelan subsidiary of PepsiCo.

With the release of Harina P.A.N. into the Venezuelan market in the early 1960s, Polar employed a well-crafted marketing strategy penetrating both public spaces and the most intimate spaces of everyday life. A key initial strategy was to target Venezuelan women, including specific “bottom of the pyramid” approaches targeting poor women (Ozegovic, 2011). Another strategy facilitating the penetration of Harina P.A.N. into the everyday lives of Venezuelans across classes was the evoking of nationalism, in which Harina P.A.N. was equated with the arepa, which was equated with Venezuela and venezolanidad. This is seen, for instance, in Polar’s sponsorship of key cultural events, especially baseball games, where its beer and arepas go hand-in-hand. Through such means, Polar positioned its Harina P.A.N. as the “brand of birth of all Venezuelans” (Torelli, 2013: 131). Given the ubiquity it would come to have in Venezuelan households, this claim is less outlandish than it sounds.

Neoliberal Reform And The Rise Of The Bolivarian Revolution

By many accounts, the modernization process was highly successful. Venezuela in the late twentieth century was commonly regarded as “one of the developing world’s success stories, an oil-rich democracy that was seen as a model for economic growth and political stability in the region” (Anderson, 2017). Tinker Salas (2015b: 46) has argued, however, that “oil never fully transformed Venezuela, but rather it created the illusion of modernity in a country where high levels of inequality persisted.” The inequalities and social tensions fostered through the colonization and modernization periods would intensify into early neoliberal era. A particularly telling moment was in 1989, when structural adjustment policies served as the final straw for an increasingly fed up population, leading to the “Caracazo,” when hundreds of thousands of people descended from Caracas’s hillside barrios into the center of the capital in a massive popular uprising (López Maya, 2003; Ciccariello-Maher, 2013).

Food inequities were among the immediate sparks of the Caracazo, as the poor endured long lines to access basic goods, while middle-class retailers hoarded these goods to speculate on rising prices in the face of inflation (Maya, 2003). Directly prior to and following the Caracazo, national media reported on crowds in search of food, while the New York Times (1989) reported “shortages of items like coffee, salt, flour, cooking oil and other basic products.” Growing tensions around food access signaled that Venezuela’s food system was not in fact serving the majority.

The immediate subcontext of the Caracazo was a wave of neoliberal reforms in the wake of the Latin American debt crisis. These continued into the 1990s, as Venezuela and many of its neighbors saw cuts to public expenditure and increased privatization. As the public sector retreated, multinational corporations came to play a more dominant role (Gouveia, 1997). Such conditions are precisely those which McMichael (2009: 147) describes as having paved the way for the current corporate food regime. In contrast to previous regimes constructed around state hegemony, “the food regime under neoliberalism institutionalizes a hegemonic relation whereby states serve capital” (McMichael, 2016: 649). This conceptualization is helpful for understanding the state of Venezuela’s food system leading into the Bolivarian Revolution in the 1990s, when the country was importing upwards of 80% of its food (FAO, 2002) through a powerful private food importation and distribution complex controlled in an oligopolistic fashion (Ríos de Hernández and Prato, 1990; Curcio Curcio, 2017).

Vargas Arenas and Sanoja (2014: 113) situate the Caracazo within a trajectory of rebellions dating back to colonization, “expressed today as a necessary process to settle the historical debt that the national state has with the [. . .] excluded majority of the population.” If a goal of the Bolivarian Revolution was to restore legitimacy by settling historical debt, a first order was to confront the food inequalities facing the population. This implied the dual, if at times divergent, tasks of addressing the immediate material needs of the more than half of the population living in hunger and poverty, largely urban, while shifting the historical patterns that had forged deep divides in Venezuela’s agrifood system. Venezuela’s new constitution, passed by popular referendum in 1999, guarantees the food security of the population through a sustainable domestic food supply. In response to this popular mandate, a variety of state-sponsored initiatives were carried out in tandem with citizen efforts. Fundamental to these were processes of agrarian reform, particularly in the decade of 2003-2012, combined with a wide variety of rural development programs (Wilpert, 2006; Davila, 2014). Rural initiatives were complemented by a range of largely urban-based food access programs reaching schools, workplaces, and households (Alayón López, 2016). These were reinforced by diverse forms of popular organization, from local communal councils and regional comunas (communes) to farmers’ and fishers’ councils, that broadened popular participation in the food system (McKay, Nehring, and Walsh-Dilley, 2014).

Such initiatives saw important gains and limitations. Notably, Venezuela surpassed the first Millennium Development Goal of halving hunger by 2015, as recognized by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO, 2015). From 2008 to 2011, hunger fell to an average of 3.1% of the population (FAO, 2017). Yet many advances in fighting hunger came from a reinforcement of the agroimport complex. The efforts toward agrarian reform in the countryside, while also receiving significant investment (Dávila, 2014), happened on largely parallel tracks. More feeding programs meant more food importation and increased consolidation of the agrifood import complex, reinforced through multiple state mechanisms. These included granting dollars to private enterprises at highly subsidized rates to import food and other essential goods. These dollars came from petroleum revenues, from which Venezuela has typically derived 95% of its foreign exchange.

This means that dollars from the state, while funding many social programs, have also been flowing into the private agrifood import complex over the course of the Bolivarian Revolution, amounting to major subsidies for the most powerful companies (Gavazut, 2014; Dachevsky and Kornblihtt, 2017). This, of course, is a fundamental policy flaw from the perspective of food sovereignty activists, who have called for agricultura zero divisas, or “zero-dollar agriculture.” According to Dachevsky and Kornblihtt (2017), such policies are facilitated by an overvaluation of the Venezuelan bolivar, which is not unique to the Bolivarian Revolution (having historically occurred in Venezuela during oil booms), but has intensified under it.

Among the top recipients of these dollars is Polar (Gavazut, 2014), which controls an estimated 50-60% of Venezuela’s precooked corn flour supply (Schipani, 2017; Curcio Curcio, 2016). This control has been facilitated through a combination of vertical concentration, strategic linkages with the state, and a multi-pronged marketing approach. On the production end, Polar’s Fundación Danac, with a germplasm collection of more than 600 corn varieties, has come to control much of the genetic base of Venezuela’s certified corn seeds, with much influence over research and seed certification (Chassaigne, 2010; Bastidas et al., 2015). On the distribution end, Polar’s connections in the retail sector run deep. In addition to having been a main shareholder of the CADA supermarket chain, Polar partnered with the Dutch firm SHV to launch Venezuela’s largest hypermarket chain, Makro, in 1992. And, as mentioned above, there is Polar’s broad-based marketing campaign. Perhaps most telling of the sheer extent of the penetration of Polar into the everyday of Venezuelans is the common equation of its products, especially its Harina P.A.N., with food itself. That is, the idea that without Polar’s products, there is no food at all. This phenomenon has not been lost on Polar, which retains the power to keep its products off the shelves just as readily as its ability to keep them on.

The Contemporary Period: Food As Control

This section moves into the contemporary period, examining the dynamics of the food shortages, food lines, and periodic street protests characterized as food riots from 2013-2018. It also takes us beyond the field work period into late 2021, characterized by a deeper economic crisis exacerbated by sanctions and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Looking back over the decade leading into 2013, we see what might be characterized as “the corporate food regime meets Bolivarian-style food sovereignty” – i.e., a food system deeply entrenched in the corporate food regime and combined efforts from above and below to change this. Food sovereignty efforts, however, have had significant limitations, often more focused on building alternatives than dismantling pre-existing power structures, and more focused on redistribution than transformation. This has left the dominant agroimport complex largely intact, fostering a scenario wherein food can be weaponized for political ends.

Those waiting in the food lines were overwhelmingly poor, working-class women (Alzuru, 2015). The lines were largely outside supermarkets, where people hoped to access specific items that were no longer available. These consisted of the most consumed industrially processed foods of the Venezuelan food basket, particularly precooked corn flour (Curcio Curcio, 2017). The selectivity of the missing items – i.e., those deemed most essential to the population – reveals holes in the narrative that the lines reflected an overall food scarcity in Venezuela. For instance, while precooked corn flour was scarce, corn-based porridge remained available; while milk powder was absent, fresh dairy products remained available, etc.²

Additional elements further challenge the scarcity narrative. First, the same items missing from shelves continued to be found in restaurants. Second, private food companies maintained steady production levels at least through 2015 (Curcio Curcio, 2017). Third, even before widespread government responses to the shortages, corn flour consumption levels among both higher- and lower-income populations remained steady from 2012-2015 (Curcio Curcio, 2017). Thus, while the shortages generated tremendous anxiety and insecurity, and while accessing certain goods became more complicated, Venezuelans found ways to secure them. In addition to enduring the lines, another access channel was an illicit parallel economy, with goods sold at a steep markup. Regular discoveries of stockpiled goods, including across the Colombian border, provided further indication of goods being intentionally diverted from supermarket shelves (Mills and Camacaro, 2015).

The food lines that began in 2013 and grew over time are widely considered a key factor in the transfer of control of the National Assembly from a majority aligned with the Bolivarian Revolution to an opposition majority under the Mesa de la Unidad Democrática (Democratic Unity Roundtable, MUD) in late 2015. Among MUD’s campaign strategies was its “La Ultima Cola” (the last line) commercial depicting dissatisfied working-class people standing in the “last line” they would have to endure should they vote for MUD (Venezuela Quiere Cambio, 2015). Despite the working-class appeal of the commercial, it did not take long for MUD to return to its wealthier, whiter base upon its ascent in the Assembly, with MUD leader Freddy Guevara calling for “the people” (i.e., MUD supporters) to take to the streets and cause mass disruption, “until the only option of the dictatorship would be to accept the less traumatic solution” (El Nacional Web, 2017).

An array of demonstrations ensued, from peaceful resistance to acts of violence. Especially strong was the attack on the state agrifood apparatus, including arson of the National Nutrition Institute, vandalism of laboratories for the production of ecological farming inputs, and multiple burnings of food supplies destined for government feeding programs (Koerner, 2017; Telesur Tv, 2017). The burn targets tragically also included people, specifically those seen with the characteristics of chavistas (i.e., poor and brown-skinned). The most visible of these attacks was against Orlando Figuera, a young Afro-Venezuelan supermarket worker, whose gruesome burning alive as countless onlookers did nothing to intervene was captured on video (Grandin, 2017).

The racial elements of the violent street protests, known as guarimbas, speak to a “class/race fusion” with “deep roots in the country’s history” (Cannon, 2008: 731). The protesters are for the most part the grandchildren of the middle class that emerged through modernization, with important links to the country’s elite, forming a middle-class-elite alliance known as ‘sifrinaje’ (López, 2015). That the guarimbas were limited to eighteen out of the country’s 335 municipalities with largely middle- and upper-class populations was largely obscured in media accounts (MacLeod, 2019).

The international press portrayed “the people” rising in response to a “humanitarian crisis” wrought by an “authoritarian regime.” A look behind the headlines, however, shows glaring contradictions, particularly in the description of guarimbas as “food riots,” given the class and racial composition of the protesters described above. Furthermore, both the targets and tactics of the guarimbas represent a stark departure from the common characteristics of food riots in history, which include shared logics of justice and fairness (Thompson, 1971).

While the MUD mobilized its bases in the streets, its leadership was in meetings with the U.S. and E.U. governments, discussing a range of interventions intended to bring an end to the Bolivarian government under Maduro. From 2015 onward, spanning the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations, the U.S. imposed an ever-tightening range of economic sanctions on Venezuelan individuals and entities, with similar measures taken by the E.U., U.K., Canada, and a number of Latin American countries (UNHCR, 2021). These have made it extremely difficult for the Venezuela government to make payments on imports of essential goods such as food, medicines, and machinery parts and to manage its debt (UNHCR, 2021; Weisbrot and Sachs, 2019). Economists Weisbrot and Sachs (2019) found that unilateral sanctions imposed by the U.S. were responsible for the deaths of more than 40,000 Venezuelans from 2017 to 2018. That was before a full-on oil embargo imposed by Trump in August 2019 and additional coercive measures (UNHCR, 2021).³

2019 brought a new round of unilateral coercive measures against Venezuela by the Trump administration, including an embargo on Venezuelan oil. The embargo alone represented estimated revenue losses of $11 billion plus an additional loss of $7 billion in illegal appropriation of assets of the Venezuelan-owned oil company CITGO from 2019 to 2020 (SURES, 2020). While the prior round of sanctions had limited the government’s ability to access goods, this round cut off Venezuela’s main source of foreign income, shrinking government funds for public expenditure to extreme lows (UNHCR, 2021). Several major power outages in 2019 brought the economy – and much of life – to a further standstill. With devalued currency and an inability to use electronic payment systems, those who had U.S. dollars stashed away used them to make essential purchases, converting the dollar from a form of savings to a main form of currency in Venezuela. This rapidly exacerbated growing inequalities, particularly between those with connections to the exterior and those without. By 2020, gasoline shortages combined with the COVID-19 pandemic added to an already extremely difficult scenario, while the U.S. continued to increase pressure on a variety of fronts, including sanctions targeting suppliers of food, medicines, and fuel to the country.

Such events not only took an extreme toll on the population; they also had major implications for food sovereignty efforts. Most significantly, they ushered in a new wave of public-private partnership, as the government has sought to compensate for lack of public funding by relying on the private sector, including through privatization of state agrifood enterprises ranging from agricultural input chains to supermarkets. Such privatizations have deepened corporate control over seeds and other key agricultural inputs, which during the 2020-2021 planting cycle were distributed primarily by new private sector actors at international prices.⁴ At the same time, in the absence of functioning state programs, new private agricultural financing agents are expanding their reach, including into the Venezuelan stock market.⁵ In the cities, the long lines have disappeared and the supermarkets now contain a diversity of imported processed goods, available at international prices that are only accessible to a minority of the population – harkening back to the decade of the Caracazo.

If 2017 was characterized by physical attacks on the public agrifood apparatus, 2019 onward has been characterized by its sanction-induced economic dismantling. This, in turn, has garnered a variety of responses from social movements, from a 2019 peasant march across the country that affirmed support for the government but decried revolutionary rollbacks, to ruptures in alliances of the leftist parties associated with the Bolivarian government.

A 2021 report by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCR, 2021) detailing the devastating impacts of sanctions notes that Venezuela’s economic woes predate the sanctions, but that the “the hardening of sanctions faced by the country since 2015 undermines the potential positive impact of the [government’s] current reforms as well as the state’s capacity to maintain infrastructure and implement social projects”. The report cites the downturn in oil prices starting in 2014 as having contributed to economic decline, adding that “Among other factors reported to affect the economy of Venezuela, mismanagement, corruption and state price controls have been cited” (UNHCR, 2021).

The Venezuelan government is not without fault in the current crisis, with a wide variety of reforms called for, from monetary policies to regulatory bodies to anti-corruption measures. Dachevsky and Kornblihtt (2017), for instance, provide a compelling analysis of the flaws in the government’s economic policies that grant subsidized dollars to private importers. At the same time, the authors make clear how these policies build upon policies predating the Bolivarian revolution rooted in processes of capital accumulation in Venezuela. The problems highlighted above are symptomatic of the fundamental structural problems of a food system based on imports and dominated by the interests of capital, through deep alliances that have been forged over the course of history. There are no quick fixes. This points to the need for wholesale change of this system, beyond individual reforms, which food sovereignty activists have indeed been calling for and working toward.

The Contemporary Period: Food As Resistance

The role of food is central in conditioning present circumstances in Venezuela, both materially and symbolically, even serving as a pretext for economic sanctions and calls for regime change. But food is also serving as a powerful tool for resistance, particularly among hardest hit working-class communities, both urban and rural. This section examines a variety of responses from both above and below, and the interactions between them.

If everyday life is the main battleground on which these challenges have played out, it has also been the frontline of resistance. When the shortages began, among the first lines of defense activated was the sharing and bartering of food and other essentials among neighbors, in a reactivation of survival techniques from the past, such as grinding fresh corn to make arepas. The shortages also sparked growth in urban agriculture and in urban-rural linkages, as local food production became increasingly essential to survival.

Early into the shortages, the government took measures to bolster such popular efforts, for example, creating the Ministry of Urban Agriculture in 2015, believed to be the first of its kind globally. A much larger effort was rolled in 2016, in the form of Comités Locales de Abastecimiento y Producción (Local Provisioning and Production Committees), known as CLAPs. Through the CLAPs, the government purchases food directly from suppliers, both private and public, and coordinates with community organizations to distribute mixed food packages to individual households. Today, CLAPs reach most of the population, with more than 120 million food packages distributed throughout the country in 2019 (Telesur TV, 2020). The CLAPs serve as an absolute lifeline to a population living under sanctions. Food sovereignty activists note, however, that CLAPs grant additional concessions to the very companies implicated in the shortages while detracting from more transformative efforts. Furthermore, CLAPs’ ongoing dependency on imported goods has made them particularly vulnerable to tightening sanctions.

While the CLAPs are a response from above that in many ways epitomizes the deepening of state-capital relations under the ongoing crisis, numerous efforts from below have attempted to break from the state-capital alliance, for instance, through forming direct links between peasants and organized popular movements. Notable among these for its reach, efficacy, and political militancy is Plan Pueblo a Pueblo (People to People Plan, PaP). This grassroots effort arose out of the current crisis in 2015 while building upon prior efforts under the Bolivarian Revolution, including by partnering with forms of citizen organization called comunas. By connecting rural producers with urban inhabitants through the preexisting comunas, PaP has achieved a scale largely unparalleled by similar initiatives, reaching nearly 50,000 urban working-class families with regular distributions of affordable fresh food in 2020 (Observatorio Venezolano de Economías Populares, 2021), even with severe challenges in accessing fuel, agricultural inputs, etc.

Most recently, PaP has attempted to reinvigorate the national school feeding program by facilitating public procurement of domestically produced foods. As of November 2021, food produced by sixty-four peasant families was reaching more than 80,000 children in 223 schools through biweekly distributions. In addition to supporting child nutrition at a critical moment, PaP organizers are motivated by the opportunity to model, from below, what a broader national food sovereignty policy could look like in the context of the current emergency. They also see this as an opportunity to sway the direction of highly contested, limited government resources toward domestic peasant agriculture and away from the private agroimport complex, with benefits for both rural and urban communities.

Pueblo a Pueblo is an example of an effort identified with the Bolivarian Revolution while independent from the government, although interacting with it in a variety of ways, particularly on school food procurement. The organizers find themselves working both with and against government policies, sometimes circumventing them altogether. They are vocal critics of many food and agricultural policies, particularly those that favor industrial agriculture and the private sector, even as they are adamant defenders of the Bolivarian Revolution and, oftentimes, of the Bolivarian government. Like many other popular efforts that comprise the Bolivarian Revolution, they see the government as holding a critical space within the state by popular mandate, a space intended to be transformed over time through citizen mobilization (Ciccariello-Maher, 2013), and it is within these broader efforts toward transformation that they see their food sovereignty activism embedded. Pueblo a Pueblo’s complex and multifaceted relationship with Maduro’s Bolivarian government can be seen with many other popular movements in Venezuela, even in the above-mentioned peasant march, which was not anti-government per se, but against the tightening state-capital alliance in which the government is implicated. Resistance under prolonged and intensifying economic sanctions has thus taken on new and more complex forms, as movements fight to protect the victories of the Bolivarian Revolution, while continuing to push them forward from below, and demanding the same from above.

Conclusion

The situation confronting Venezuela today is far more complex than portrayed in dominant narratives. Through the lens of food, new elements emerge that are key to understanding the present conjuncture. Most fundamentally, we can see how processes initiated under colonization continue unfolding into the present, particularly regarding elite alliances that form the basis for state-capital relations extending throughout much of the food system. We can also see how those alliances are tightening in the current moment of crisis, bringing about both the physical and economic dismantling of the public-controlled elements of the food system while strengthening private control. This in turn is exacerbating inequalities that the Bolivarian Revolution had made great strides in addressing earlier on. The distress facing Venezuelans as they try to feed themselves today is largely the product of an intentional series of attacks on one society’s most fundamental pillars: the ability to produce, distribute, and consume food.

In this scenario, much of the literature to date has focused on the role of the government, often with a strong pro or con binary. We hope the above analysis has highlighted that what really needs to be interrogated is the state, which extends far beyond the government alone, and was forged out of colonial and neo-colonial relations serving the consolidation of corporate power over time. From the popular movement perspective, the Bolivarian Revolution threw a wrench into a very powerful and deeply entrenched machinery. The task of food sovereignty construction arguably involves dismantling this machinery and building something new. This, in turn, involves the transformation of the state, which is why food sovereignty and the broader goals of the Bolivarian Revolution are inextricably linked in the eyes of many activists. It also involves working to undo and transform patterns of production and consumption that are deeply etched in the everyday life of society.

Just as a lens of food helps to elucidate the complex dynamics of the government and state, it also sheds light on developments from below, both the nuanced relationship between movements and government and the largely autonomous popular actions that are arguably the driving force of the Bolivarian Revolution. This analysis requires moving beyond simplistic depictions of either the protesting masses rising up against an authoritarian regime or movements in lockstep with the government in a clientelistic relationship. Through a lens of food, we see how forms of resistance today build directly upon those of the past, and how the possibilities of the present have been directly shaped by the pushes and pulls of food as control and food as resistance over time.

Moving beyond binaries and fixed categories to analyze the present situation in Venezuela, a far more complex and interesting picture emerges. For instance, we see how movements such as Pueblo a Pueblo are at once working through, against, and beyond existing government mechanisms, while simultaneously pushing for new paradigms. Within this work by a multitude of interlinked, bottom-up efforts articulated with the Bolivarian Revolution, important new alignments and paths forward are being identified and attempted. As pointed out by Fraser (2017), it is within such new alignments that emancipatory potential exists.

If the flip side of scholarly pursuits of authoritarian populism is to uncover the emancipatory alternatives arising in response to it (Scoones et al., 2018), it bears interrogating why, in the case of Venezuela, the emancipatory work performed on the ground – in complex relation to the government and state – is systematically erased. This erasure of emancipatory trends, furthermore, is accompanied by an erasure, or dismissal, of authoritarian trends (economic sanctions being an ultimate manifestation of them) directly impacting not only the lives of an entire populace, but an emancipatory project that, despite numerous pronouncements of death, lives on.

Footnotes

Notes

Ana Felicien is a Venezuelan agroecology activist and researcher working at the Transdisciplinary Ecology Laboratory for Human Wellbeing at the Instituto Venezolano de Investigaciones Científicas (Venezuelan Institute of Scientific Research, IVIC). Christina M. Schiavoni is an independent food sovereignty scholar and activist. She recently completed her PhD at the International Institute of Social Studies in The Hague, Netherlands. Liccia Romero is a professor at the Universidad de Los Andes based in Mérida, Venezuela. She is a founding member of Mano a Mano - Intercambio Agroecológico.

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