Posted on 01/05/2005 11:55:47 AM PST by george wythe
Venezuelan authorities have identified more than 500 farms, including 56 large estates, as idle as it continues with its controversial land reform policy. Under a 2001 land law, the government can tax or seize unused farm sites.
A further 40,000 farms are yet to be inspected, the state's National Land Institute has told Associated Press.
Vice president Jose Vicente Rangel has said farmers and ranchers with their titles in order and their lands productive have "nothing to fear."
Critics of the land reform policy claim president Hugo Chavez is trying to enforce a communist-style economic programme that ignores property rights and will damage the country.
Land owners claim the National Land Institute has made mistakes in classifying lands as public or private.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.bbc.co.uk ...
Didn't Saloth Sar try this?
Jimmy Carter-Castro must be so proud.
Hunger and starvation is a'coming
Of course, foreign owned farms will be the first targets:Under the law, private farms may also be seized if owners do not use the land sufficiently for agriculture or if they fail to prove they obtained the property legally.
A 32,000-acre ranch owned by a British cattle company is among those considered "partly idle" and its property titles are not in order, Otaiza said Tuesday. The El Charcote ranch sits on land previously owned by the government and the British Vestey Group has failed to prove it legally acquired the land, Otaiza added.The government could expropriate part of the land and impose a production plan on Agroflora, the Vestey subsidiary that operates the ranch.
Agroflora has been fighting to oust more than 600 squatters who have now taken over roughly 90 percent of the ranch's land, according to Alejandro Arcay, the company's lawyer.
I'm betting that the American liberals are watching with keen interest. They're thinking, "Could we get away with something like that?"
The longer Chavez rules, the more suffering there will be. He should have been chopped off at the knees a couple of years ago.
I believe we already have similar laws. Idle land can be claimed by people who live on it after a length of time.
Wow...this sounds suspiciously like 'nationalization' of property (actually, thats precisely what it is.) I think we all know what that leads to...
You're talking about adverse possession, I think. That's not the same thing. That is just a statute of limitations which says that if you possess land thinking it's yours, and someone shows up one day claiming it's his, you can keep it if you've had possession for a long enough time, because the statute of limitations for the opposing party's claim has passed.
Chavez is simply trying to take land from people who aren't using it. Different animal.
First, the socialists will confiscate foreign-owned land and large estates.
Next, the small farmers will be 'encouraged' to join government-owned cooperatives and to sell their foodstuffs only to government-owned warehouses.
Finally, the small farmers who fail to become government serfs will be called 'CIA agents, counterrevolutionaries, and petit bourgeois' and persecuted.
See Soviet Union, Cuba, etc.
Don't forget about eminent domain where if WalMart wants your land, they just convice the city council that more taxes would be collected if you are removed and the land is given to WalMart.
It is time for the Terror phase of Party power consolidation.
The Genocide will follow in due course.
Why all the complaining?
It worked great in Zimbabwe didn't it?
This is the same lie that Castro said. Death is sure to follow.
The property of this country is absolutely concentred in a very few hands, having revenues of from half a million of guineas a year downwards. These employ the flower of the country as servants, some of them having as many as 200 domestics, not laboring. They employ also a great number of manufacturers and tradesmen, and lastly the class of laboring husbandmen. But after all there comes the most numerous of all classes, that is, the poor who cannot find work. I asked myself what could be the reason so many should be permitted to beg who are willing to work, in a country where there is a very considerable proportion of uncultivated lands? These lands are undisturbed only for the sake of game. It should seem then that it must be because of the enormous wealth of the proprietors which places them above attention to the increase of their revenues by permitting these lands to be labored. I am conscious that an equal division of property is impracticable, but the consequences of this enormous inequality producing so much misery to the bulk of mankind, legislators cannot invent too many devices for subdividing property, only taking care to let their subdivisions go hand in hand with the natural affections of the human mind. The descent of property of every kind therefore to all the children, or to all the brothers and sisters, or other relations in equal degree, is a politic measure and a practicable one. Another means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions or property in geometrical progression as they rise. Whenever there are in any country uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right. The earth is given as a common stock for man to labor and live on. If for the encouragement of industry we allow it to be appropriated, we must take care that other employment be provided to those excluded from the appropriation. If we do not, the fundamental right to labor the earth returns to the unemployed. It is too soon yet in our country to say that every man who cannot find employment, but who can find uncultivated land, shall be at liberty to cultivate it, paying a moderate rent. But it is not too soon to provide by every possible means that as few as possible shall be without a little portion of land. The small landholders are the most precious part of a state.
-- Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, Oct. 28, 1785 -- PROPERTY AND NATURAL RIGHT
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