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<div class="header reader-header reader-show-element" dir="ltr"> <font
size="-2"><a class="domain reader-domain"
href="https://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/14707">https://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/14707</a></font>
<h1 class="reader-title">Venezuela: Fighting the Economic War
‘People to People’</h1>
<div class="credits reader-credits">By FRFI – Revolutionary
Communist Group - October 29, 2019<br>
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<p><em>As US sanctions attempt to strangle Venezuela,
costing over $130bn, blocking imports of food and
medicine and contributing to the deaths of at least
40,000 people; popular power initiatives are
fighting back, building an alternative to the
shortages and inflation inflicted by the cruel
blockade and economic crisis. One such initiative
is Pueblo a Pueblo (‘People to People’), linking
rural producers to communities in the cities,
joining up production, distribution and consumption.
This cuts out the speculators who buy in bulk to
sell for sky-high prices, it undermines the
smugglers who divert food over the border for resale
in Colombia, it confronts the reliance on imports
that so often distorts the economies of
oil-producing nations. Not simply a farmers’
market, Pueblo a Pueblo sets prices and plans
production through assemblies, organising with
communes and cooperatives to ensure democratic
distribution in working-class barrios in the cities.
Food is brought directly to organised events where a
community meal is served as collectives bag up
produce for participants to buy at prices 70%
cheaper than on the market. It is initiatives such
as these, often led by women, that are challenging
the logic of capitalism and combating US sanctions.
It is exactly this grassroots resistance, this
participatory democracy in practice, which is
suppressed and censored in our capitalist media.</em></p>
<p><em>Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! interviewed
Pablo Gimenez, collaborator with Pueblo a Pueblo and
professor of political economy at the Bolivarian
University of Venezuela, Caracas.</em></p>
<p><strong>FRFI: </strong><em>What is the work of the </em>Pueblo
a Pueblo<em> network? Can you give some examples of
how you operate locally and nationally?</em></p>
<p><strong>Pablo Gimenez: </strong><em>Pueblo a Pueblo</em> is
a popular plan for the production, distribution and
consumption of food that brings together small and
medium agricultural producers and connects them
directly with urban populations using a method of
double participation where producers and consumers
collaborate to set prices in a transparent way. This
seeks to solve the problems that occur in the chains
of distribution, commercialisation and supply of
agricultural products, displacing speculators and
influencing the formation of prices. An assembly
discusses production costs for that week, then the
products are moved to collection centres from where
they are transported to Caracas and other cities in
the country to organised events for their consumption.
We work under the slogan: ‘food is not a commodity,
but a human right.’ In this exchange system nobody
subsidies nor deceives; participation, cost structures
and transparent prices (known and agreed by all
parties) allow everyone to receive fair remuneration
for their work and contribution to the scheme, as well
as producing the necessary food to meet basic needs.</p>
<p>From 100 hectares of the Carache municipality in
Trujillo state, 140 families work the land to supply
2,500 urban families each week; on average each person
receives 3kg of produce.</p>
<p>Some items are incorporated into the scheme from the
most diverse areas of the country. For example, the
remote mountain town of Mucuchies in Merida produces
native potato seeds for cultivation in surrounding
areas through an alliance with the Integral Producers
of the Paramo (Proinpa) co-operative. They collaborate
with <em>Pueblo a Pueblo</em> through a plan we call:
‘Potatoes for life and not for capital’ (previously
they had to rely on intermediaries who bought their
crops at very poor prices and sold them on at huge
mark ups). The collective control of the production
cycle from seed to consumption has produced important
results. The ‘Potatoes for life’ plan has energised
economic activity in Mucuchies, reactivating a social
property enterprise that manages potato storage sheds
in Mérida and the Sisal Fibrovensa sack factory.</p>
<p>On 5 October we completed 201 consecutive days of
food production and distribution, exceeding the
milestone of 2,500 tons of food produced since 2015.
Recently <em>Pueblo a Pueblo</em> won an award from
the Alliance for Food Sovereignty of the United
States, an occasion that we consider conducive to
consolidate the formation of international brigades
for the collection and transfer of seeds to producers
in Venezuela, developing cooperation networks between
peoples in accordance with our principles. The USFSA
is a network of grassroots organizations that annually
awards the Food sovereignty award to recognise
projects that work for a more democratic food system.
This award was developed to oppose the World Food
Prize, which was founded by ‘the father of the Green
Revolution’ Norman Borlaug [whose practices have been
used to undermine food sovereignty whilst pushing
reliance on big agri-business<em>]</em>. USFSA
specifically recognised our work towards ‘the
construction of popular power to confront capitalism
and imperialism, efforts for transition towards a
socialist economy, recovery of seed varieties,
reduction of the use of agrochemicals, organisation in
food distribution, and strengthening women’s position
in leadership.’ This was a big achievement for us.</p>
<p><strong>FRFI: </strong><em>What has been the impact
of the US blockade and imperialist aggression? Can
you talk about the reality in Venezuela, how
shortages affect communities, how people survive?
How does the work you do contribute to resistance?</em></p>
<p><strong>PG:</strong> Sanctions have a grave impact on
the country in general, especially on households and
in particular in the family farming sector. For
producers the main problems are access to seeds and
inputs. However, thanks to platforms such as <em>Pueblo
a Pueblo</em> that guarantee access to seeds to all
those who participate in the plan, people are
surviving by increasing production, guaranteeing their
incomes. There is also the transport problem,
transport has suffered the impacts of increasing
maintenance costs, lack of spare parts and travel
costs. Nevertheless, <em>Pueblo a Pueblo</em> continuously
strives to overcome these difficulties, making huge
efforts to guarantee the logistics of transporting
produce each day. For consumers, there has been a
significant fall in purchasing power, which means not
all the products are bought. This illustrates that our
distribution must be expanded to new organised
communities and new organised consumption events,
finding other ways of distributing food. So we face
the problems of planning production and distribution
to mitigate the effects of sanctions, facing down the
multi-dimensional warfare confronting Venezuela.</p>
<p><em>Pueblo a Pueblo</em> is perhaps the greatest
experience of self-managed socio-productive
integration at the national level. We produce and
resist, developing popular empowerment and
contributing to the construction of an alternative
economy from below, maintaining coherence with the
principles of the Bolivarian Revolution and the
socialist project in the 21st century. Ours is not
simply a plan for the sale of food at prices below
market, nor is it a form of food delivery. We are
instead developing a new way of relating: self-managed
socialism, producing food and distributing it
communally, without intermediaries, along a plan
organised to meet need. This poses the economic
planning of the organized people directly against
capitalist relations of production.</p>
<p>Our network not only challenges established paradigms
of food production, but also provides solutions in the
midst of an intense economic war which particularly
affects the working class. The economic crisis, the
sanctions, the financial and commercial blockade
promoted by the Trump administration make the <em>Pueblo
a Pueblo</em> initiative a truly heroic act, outside
all [capitalist]<em> </em>economic rationality. They
say that crises are opportunities that push people to
find the conditions for overcoming those same crises.
Our people do not give up or waver in our struggle, on
the contrary we create new conditions in order to
overcome. Our rebel cry since the beginning of the
Bolivarian revolution is as true today: ‘Only the
people save the people’.</p>
<p><strong>FRFI: </strong><em>How best do you think
solidarity activists in imperialist Britain can best
support the people-to-people network and the
struggle in Venezuela in general?</em></p>
<p><strong>PG:</strong> I believe we must weave a
network of international relations ‘people to people’.
A first step could be an international seed brigade
that brings seeds to Venezuela bypassing the blockade
and sanctions, another important issue is to continue
communicating the reality of what is happening in
Venezuela, breaking the media blockade and also to
think of how the Venezuelan experience can strengthen
struggles in other countries.</p>
<p><em>For an account of some of the work of the Pueblo
a Pueblo network see <a
href="https://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/13862">https://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/13862</a>.</em></p>
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