Many studies illustrate that intensification can be unsustainable, but several notable projects in Africa and elsewhere have shown that sustainable intensification is possible and necessary to boost global crop production. Clearly, the world faces a looming and growing agricultural crisis. Yields are not improving fast enough to keep up with projected demands in 2050. However, opportunities do exist to increase production through more efficient use of current arable lands and increasing yield growth rates by spreading best management practices and closing yield gaps under different management regimes across the globe. A portion of the production shortfall could also be met by expanding croplands, but at a high environmental cost to biodiversity and carbon emissions. Alternatively, additional strategies, particularly changing to more plant-based diets and reducing food waste can reduce the large expected demand growth in food.We used annual crop census reports for harvested areas and yield from ,13,500 political units globally covering 20 years from 1989 to 2008 in this analysis though the database itself covers the years 1961 to 2008. The sum total of these census reports for the 20 years was approximately 1.8 million.Data were not available for all political units for each year. Details of the number of years data was available and its source is given in the Table S1. For the political units where data was missing for some years we estimated crop harvested and yield information using the average of the latest five years of reported data and constraining them with the reported numbers from the higher political unit as explained further in Text S1 and previous work. Population data and its projections per country were from the United Nation’s medium variant projections. Crop production was determined using the projected crop yields at current observed rates of yield change and harvested areas fixed at ,2007. Per capita harvested production is the ratio of production to population and a greater than 610% change from ,2007 is considered as significant either in the short- or long-term .While the relationship between the commercial agriculture sector and the Venezuelan state is often oppositional and conflictive,hydroponic nft this chapter argues that sectors of commercial agriculture also benefit from government policies.

This policy capture allows commercial farms to reproduce themselves and largely maintain their socio-economic position. Reading commercial agriculture and state relationships as conflictive, therefore, is incomplete and leaves relatively unpacked an important sector of Venezuela’s overall agro-food system. Specific relationships between the state and the commercial sector and the implications for reform of the smallholder sector are largely absent from contemporary analyses of the Venezuelan agrarian reform process that tend to focus almost exclusively on statepeasant relationships. This chapter addresses this analytical gap by considering relationships between the state, commercial agriculture, and the peasant sector. A more relational look between commercial agriculture and the Venezuelan state can also help problematize literature that characterizes the Chavista state as socialist in intention, if imperfect and incomplete in its implementation. The dynamics of commercial agriculture in the agro-food system reveals how agricultural policy in Venezuela’s petro-socialist context actively maintains commercial growers, the often-discursive ‘enemies’ of the agrarian reform. The state’s emphasis on raising production to maintain food availability in the face of scarcity and to reduce dependence of food imports, shapes policy in ways that help to reinforce the position of commercial agriculture, even as its stated policy emphasis is promotion of the smallholder sector and a reordering of agrarian social relations. The alignment of the major agribusiness federation FEDEAGRO—as well as FEDENAGA the cattle ranchers’ association—with the political opposition to the government, a number of high-profile fights over state land seizures, nationalizations of supermarket and agricultural input firms, and violence against peasants active in the agrarian reform process would seem to paint an overwhelmingly contentious picture of relations between commercial agriculture interests and the Venezuelan state. Indeed, landowners and commercial elites have stymied reform efforts through legal challenges, by wielding influence in local networks or regional institutions involved in agrarian reform, and by using violence against peasants involved in the agrarian reform process.

The land reform’s perceived attack on private property rights and the supposed failures of government intervention in the food system figure prominently in opposition critiques of the state. These oppositional aspects of the commercial sector vis á vis the state have often been portrayed in the literature on Venezuela as indicative of class conflict in a period of socialist transformation and representative of barriers to implementation of state policy . For example, Enríquez argues that roadblocks to reform in Venezuela’s land reform sector are in large part due to the functioning of ‘dual power’ in Venezuela, where Venezuela’s landed elite struggle to maintain their class position in a reform process that seeks to wrest control of the agricultural system and remake it privilege other actors and production systems. Enríquez argues the ‘old regime’ has been able to fight reform in the context of ‘brown areas’ , geographical, economic, political, or ideological spaces where old systems remain outside the control of the reformist state. These brown areas afford agricultural elites possibilities to block implementation of reforms that challenges their interests. In this reading, the Chavista government has been unable to completely capture state institutions in order to remake them to function for new, ‘socialist’ goals, or state institutions have failed to break landowner influence in specific areas of Venezuela. Harnecker’s analysis of the ‘revolutionary’ states of Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador argues that an old state and an emerging, more progressive state coexist in a ‘relationship of complementarity’ during a transition to socialism . Harnecker argues that the ‘bureaucraticism’ of the old state can impede progress towards development of the socialist state via persistent ‘excessive centralization’ . If we apply Harnecker’s frame to the agrarian reform, the continued hold on prime agricultural land by commercial producers in Venezuela is explained primarily by reform policies being bogged down in the bureaucratic morass of state institutions charged with their implementation. In this reading, Venezuela is characterized as a state transitioning to socialism whose revolutionary goals are being blocked by barriers emerging from this amalgamation of an ‘old’ and ‘new’ state.

This dissertation, however, argues that a simple oppositional/class conflict role in agrarian relations between the landed class and state and agrarian reform sectors, and the related assumption that a socialist economy is the primary goal of state policy-making, is incomplete. Harnecker’s vision of an old versus new state can leave unexamined relations between the state and the capitalist sector that can inform how reformist/revolutionary states engage with this sector in strategies that balance economic and political needs. Enríquez’s argument that incomplete control over institutions and territories by socialist actors impedes the transformation of rural social relations does not address the state’s relationships with the commercial agriculture sector nor the broader political economy dynamics of a petro-state and how they shape both policy formation and implementation. By engaging with structural and policy dynamics between the capitalist commercial agriculture sector and the state, this chapter seeks to firstly, bring in the capitalist sector into an analysis of state agro-food policy in order to understand Venezuela’s greater agrarian political economy, while avoiding overly facile characterizations of relationships between the state, commercial agriculture, and the peasant sector as necessarily conflictive. Secondly, this chapter links this broader agro-food policy analysis to political economic dynamics of Venezuela as a petro-state. This is not to argue that class conflict between agrarian elites and the state is not central to agrarian dynamics. Class conflict does indeed permeate the agrarian reform. Rather I argue that understanding commercial agriculture’s relationship to the state from a more critical perspective illuminates constraints on policy formation and implementation in Venezuela as a reformist state pursuing a mixed-economy model in an extractive industry context. This chapter draws on the state of Portuguesa as a case study to illustrate the dynamics of commercial agriculture and Chavista agro-food policy. Portuguesa is one of the most important agricultural centers within Venezuela,hydroponic channel especially in cereal and oilseed production and related agro-industry. In 2001, Portuguesa produced over half of the country’s rice and 90% of its sesame . Indicative of its influence in agriculture circles, the president of FEDEAGRO is a grower from Portuguesa, who also heads ASOPORTUGUESA, an important local grower association. This chapter is arranged in three parts. Part one examines the historical formation of agrarian relations in Portuguesa and charts the state’s development of a vertically-integrated agro-industrial sector. Part two analyzes contemporary agricultural policy and relationships between the state and commercial agriculture within Portuguesa.

Part three places these agrarian dynamics within the broader political economy of Venezuela as a petro-socialist state and its orientation towards a mixed economy in its agriculture sector. Portuguesa, especially the agro-industrial center of Acarigua-Araure, is at the core of Venezuela’s breadbasket. Prior to the 1940s, however, the area around Acarigua was a thinly populated area of tropical forest mixed with savanna whose economy was based primarily in exploitation of forests for lumber, cattle ranching, and whose peasantry grew some staple crops as well as serving as occasional labor in sawmills . Portuguesa was, thus, not central to the agrarian economy in the pre-oil era that was based on plantation production of coffee and cacao for export. The transformation into Venezuela’s premier agro-industrial area grew out of centralized state development programs that restructured agrarian relations and land ownership patterns, mobilized state capital for the development of mechanized and largely capital intensive agriculture, and subordinated the 1960s agrarian reform program to serving the labor and raw material needs of the emerging commercial growers . The eventual result was the formation of a vertically integrated, commercial agrarian elite that dominated the socio-economic life of the region. By the 1940s, rising GDP from the expansion of oil production and rapid urbanization in Venezuela created a growing demand for agricultural products that outstripped domestic production capacity. In response, policymakers sought to modernize the agricultural sector to raise production to meet national food needs. Efforts to modernize the agriculture sector by the military governments ruling Venezuela in the 1940s and 50s saw the Portuguesa economy transform into a principal crop producer in the nation. The Venezuelan state was instrumental in the establishment of a production system oriented towards larger-scale mechanization of commodity crops that displaced the previous agricultural systems. Managed by the state institution the Venezuelan Public Works Corporation , the Rice Plan established mechanized rice production by distributing parcels of up to 200 hectares—the minimum size deemed necessary for the successful introduction of mechanization—and generous agricultural credits . Resistance to land redistribution by larger landowners and smallholders who used state land for pasturing, was broken by the state governor who seized estates and removed landowners and smaller-scale traditional users . The Rice Plan was developed to provision growing domestic, rather than export markets. Within five years of the program’s initiation, Venezuela was producing enough rice to cover domestic consumption. Yet the growth of the sector required expansion from the existing savanna areas into Portuguesa’s adjacent tropical forests driving deforestation. While cleared forests areas initially provided higher yields, putting forested land into production required larger capital outlays, and producers adopted a strategy of diversified production, planting sesame in the dry season—rice being grown in the rainy season—and eventually integrated maize and sorghum and sugarcane into production systems . These dynamics drove increased mechanization and continued intensification of land use in the region. Alongside the national Rice Plan in Portuguesa was an agrarian colonization scheme that brought in and distributed land to European immigrants primarily from Germany and Italy. As part of the Venezuelan agrarian reform program peasants were settled next to European colonists in the colony of  Turén under the assumption that they would learn ‘modern’ and ‘rational’ cultivation techniques from the Europeans . Agrarian reform beneficiaries, however, received smaller parcels and insufficient state credit support compared to the European colonists, leading to eventually abandonment of many plots with the now landless peasants migrating to urban areas or becoming farm workers on the more successful estates . Like in the Acarigua-Araure center, agricultural expansion displaced traditional land users and drove the replacement of tropical forests with plowed fields.