and I believe they are trying to build their country up to a point where they'll be self-sufficient within the ALBA bloc but their priority has been on feeding people and, just as importantly, educating them. It takes a lot of time for eggs to hatch and it's not as if they had an easy time these past 16 years either. Some of the land is only just now recovering from the heavy use of pesticides big plantations had used and Maduro is planning to use those for crops.
This may be a simplistic question but why do you feel they need to even have export earnings later on? What's wrong with building up the country now, while the oil money is good and then living simply, on their own products + ALBA products exchanged in Sucre, within their means?
There's a whole Marxist Dependency theory on this subject, that if a less developed country wants to develop, it needs to take a different path than industrialized nations and not play the dance of global markets. When you stay in the export game, you start being dependent on the capital of whoever is importing your goods and the relationship is never equal.
It's not something I give a lot of thought to, especially for other countries, because none of them are asking for my opinion but I find your post interesting and appreciate the thought you put into it. My question may seem very simplistic to you, stupid even but why does any country need to export anything? I understand how some do, and I understand how some countries who refuse to produce certain things can't survive without imports (for example England which won't produce food and choose instead to concentrate on manufacturing to export) but this led to much plundering, at gunpoint even, of other countries, because so-called developed countries don't want to pay a fair price for the imports. If they did, they wouldn't be on top anymore. The global game's all about getting everything you can for as cheap as you can and if they won't give it to you, force them to.
I have the impression that many countries in Latin America, whose indigenous populations are rising and whose goods were exported for hundreds of years, want a different way of life, one closer to their roots and traditions. I could be wrong, it's not something I've given much thought to.
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