Venuzuela's Co-op Boom (Employment)

[Demeter]

http://coanews.org/tiki-read_article.php?articleId=1918


To end poverty, put poor people in charge of their livelihood. A co-op boom turns the jobless into worker/owners.....181,000 cooperatives officially registered in Venezuela as of the end of last year—an astonishing figure that puts the South American nation at the top of the list of countries in the world with the most cooperatives. Over 99 percent of Venezuela’s cooperatives have registered since President Hugo Chávez Frias took office in 1999. The cooperative boom is key to the shift by the Venezuelan government towards an economy based on the inclusion of traditionally excluded sectors of society and the promotion of alternative business models as part of its drive towards what Chávez calls “socialism of the 21st century.”

Seeds of Venezuela’s Co-op Boom

At the time that President Chávez was elected in 1998, poverty had been on a slow but constant rise since the middle half of the century. The consolidation of lands into a few hands had displaced farmers who migrated in large numbers to the cities in search of work. As a result, Venezuela became the most urbanized country in Latin America; its capital, Caracas, is surrounded by poor barrios that house almost half of its population of nearly 5 million in substandard conditions. The implantation of neoliberal policies during the 1990s only aggravated the situation by privatizing state-owned businesses, and cutting subsidies and social spending. Inflation skyrocketed and zeros piled on to the end of the national currency, the Bolivar. Venezuela’s poor were left with few options in a society that former vice-minister of popular economy (MINEP) Juan Carlos Loyo, described last year as “profoundly individualistic ... profoundly unequal, and discriminatory.”

In 1998, however, things began to change. Chávez was elected president with the promise to rewrite the Constitution. As he built on the vision of South America’s liberator, Simón Bolívar, his popularity grew among the poor. His “Bolivarian Revolution,” Loyo says, includes building an economic system “based on solidarity and not exploitation.” Chávez decreed the Special Law of Cooperative Associations in 2001, which made it easier to form cooperatives, and, in the words of former Cooperative Superintendent (SUNACOOP) Carlos Molina, “transformed cooperatives into a fundamental tool of social inclusion.”

Why cooperativism? “Because cooperativism goes further than purely economic activity, and is based on productive relations which are collective, in solidarity, and above all else inclusive,” says Molina. The Venezuelan government began promoting the creation of co-ops by prioritizing them for government contracts, offering grants and loans with little or no interest, and eliminating income tax requirements for co-ops. Cooperative numbers immediately began to grow.


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Michael Fox is a freelance journalist based in South America. In 2006, he was a staff writer with Venezuelanalysis (www.venezuelanalysis.com) and a correspondent with Free Speech Radio News.


FASCINATING ALTERNATIVE TO CAPITALISM!