Agriculture and rural society in pre-petroleum Venezuela: The Sur del Lago zuliano, 1880-1920

Following the First World War, European and United States oil companies undertook to develop Venezuela's extensive petroleum resources. Their efforts yielded spectacular results; by 1928 Venezuela had become a world leader in oil production and exportation. Because the rise in oil production coincided with difficulties in the agricultural sector, many historians have charged that the petroleum industry brought about the downfall of Venezuelan agriculture, mainly by diverting needed labor. Acceptance of this idea has not been universal. Some historians and economists assert that Venezuela's agricultural sector suffered from grave structural problems long before the start of the oil boom. However, scholars on both sides of the question focus their investigations on the national level without paying the necessary attention to local and regional differences.;This is a study of a specific region in the decades immediately preceding the advent of oil production. Its purpose is to examine a specific agricultural region, the Sur del Lago zuliano. Located in the state of Zulia, near the heart of the nation's oil industry, the Sur del Lago zuliano was by the late nineteenth century an important food producer for the urban market of Maracaibo. Despite rapidly growing demand for its products, the Sur del Lago zuliano remained through the 1920s and 1930s a frontier area only gradually being settled. It was characterized by low population, small property size, and an inadequate system for financing, transporting, and marketing agricultural produce. Structural constraints kept the pace of change slow and uneven. Agricultural properties remained relatively small, and an abundance of public lands open to settlement made for many smallholders. The same constraints were a source of constant frustration for large landowners attempting to expand production and render their operations more efficient. Individuals and combinations sought to cope with the problems of transportation and shortages of labor but met with limited success. As a result, when the oil industry brought large numbers of newcomers to the lands around Maracaibo, the agricultural producers of the Sur del Lago were unable adequately to respond. Rising population in the 1920s brought first food shortages and then the large-scale importation of food. In short, the conditions existing in the late nineteenth century continued in force well after the coming of oil to at least this part of Venezuela.