Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro announces the launch of the Patria Grande del Sur agroecological project, March 13, 2025. Photo: Presidential Press.
The president of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, announced that Brazil’s Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (MST) will oversee production on 180,000 hectares of land in Venezuela’s Bolívar state as part of the Patria Grande del Sur agroecological project. The initiative aims to promote large-scale agroecological food production as part of the Bolivarian Revolution’s goal of achieving food sovereignty.
“It will be the largest project led by a peasant movement to produce food using agroecological methods on a large scale for our people in Venezuela, Brazil, and the world,” President Maduro said Thursday, March 13, during the launch of the Patria Grande del Sur project.
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“We are going to produce a little bit of everything: fruits, milk, sugarcane, yams, chicken, pork, beef, their derivatives, vegetables, corn, eggs, and we are proposing to build a great bank of traditional bio-natural seeds and a nursery of seedlings for the reforestation of the South,” he explained.
“Big dreams and big plans, and today, March 13, 2025, I can say that the Patria Grande del Sur project begins with the land prepared and the seeds in the hands of the people,” he added.
He also reported that 30,000 hectares will be dedicated to cultivating beans.
Referring to the 180,000 hectares, he noted that it is “good land for production. It is one of the most significant land recoveries that has taken place. We are moving forward, and we are going to activate all the production plans.”
“Today we are sowing a superior union because we are going to demonstrate that we can come together to produce and to exchange knowledge and experience,” the president said. “The Landless Workers’ Movement has vast experience; in its camps, values, culture, and organization are taught.”
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Roxana Fernandez, a member of the MST, expressed her happiness and emphasized that this is an act of reaffirmation and commitment by the MST to the Venezuelan people, “to create here a model and an example for the world.”
“It will be a model of agroecological production, political training, with techniques developed by the Brazilian rural workers’ movement, which has been engaged in the struggle for 41 years,” she said. “We have a lot of experience, and we are going to contribute to Venezuela, in solidarity with the Venezuelan people, to strengthen their sovereignty.”
She stressed that the path to sovereignty is built by the people. “The MST reaffirms the principle of solidarity and internationalism when we carry out these acts, concretizing the gains from our struggle to make the land our territory and to build a different societal project: socialism, in which we believe,” she commented.
She added that the MST aims to learn how to build popular power with the people of Venezuela. “The revolution of our Great Homeland will be constructed in this way: we will make Latin America a land free of agribusiness,” she emphasized.
“In this way, the people can be happy and sovereign,” she said.
Meanwhile, Venezuelan Minister of Communes Ángel Prado stated that this will be a project of liberated lands: lands belonging to peasants and agricultural communities in Venezuela and across South America. “Here is cocoa, banana, citrus; here are the organized communes and indigenous circuits,” he said.
(Telesur) with Orinoco Tribune content
Translation: Orinoco Tribune
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