IN AN organic vegetable garden surrounded by skyscrapers in the centre of Caracas, a dozen workers are bent over, weeding beds of lettuce. The scene is more like China’s peasant revolution than modern-day Venezuela, one of world’s great oil-producing nations.

It is one of hundreds of cooperatives all over the country aimed at ending its dependence on imported food. The project is the centrepiece of President Hugo Chavez’s “Bolivarian” Revolution. Taking his inspiration from Simon Bolivar, the Latin American hero, he talks of a struggle to end US domination of global economics.

That is why he is striving to boost Venezuela’s hitherto dismal domestic output of food. For years the world’s fifth largest exporter of oil has imported 70 per cent of its food needs.

The key is what Señor Chavez calls “endogenous development”, making the economy self-sufficient by subsidising domestic agriculture and industry. Until recently unaware of the word endogenous, Venezuelans are now used to hearing it referred to constantly. The Government is training an army of workers to boost production and 400,000 people are already enrolled. If it succeeds, the country will become self-sufficient in food and many consumer goods by 2021.

A large part of the plan involves reversing the drift into the cities. Poor slum-dwellers are to be encouraged to rediscover their peasant roots. Last month the president launched a new land reform campaign which he calls Venezuela’s “Great Leap Forward” for the poor, evoking Mao Zedong disastrous plan in the late 1950s.

Critics say it is quixotic, ill-conceived social engineering. “His plan won’t work,” said Carlos Machado, an agribusiness professor at the Caracas-based IESA business school. “The state is the worst farmer. All he can hope to achieve is a prize for preserving poverty.”

Venezuela supplies 13 per cent of US oil. President Bush’s new Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, called the Venezuelan leader a “negative force”, during recent congressional hearings.

Venezuelan officials are confident of success. “People are waking up,” said Norali Verenzuela, who runs the organic garden. “We’ve been dependent on McDonald’s for so long.”

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