La alimentación como derecho humano y sus vínculos con las políticas económicas en Venezuela: de la I República al Socialismo del Siglo XXI

The right to food is an inclusive human right, according to which every person should have access to the intake of all the nutritional elements required to live a healthy and active life, and the means to realize it. Through the policies and means at their disposal, it is the responsibility of the States to act and ensure food and nutritional security for the entire population. In the case of Venezuela, a rural and agricultural exporting nation until the 1930s, different ideological currents and interests have shaped the heterogeneity of policies implemented from since its configuration as an nation-state started in 1830 to the present, including those aimed at meeting food and nutritional needs. In this scenario, the article aims to i) make an inventory of the main general economic and sectoral agricultural/agrifood policies implemented by the different governments throughout the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, with emphasis on the period 2013-2021; and, ii) on this basis, discuss how they have contributed guarantying the exercise of this right to the whole population. Methodologically, a historical-economic approach is followed to examine the main policies, also supported by theory and empirical evidence. Various secondary sources of information were reviewed, cataloged, and contrasted, both bibliographic and periodical, as well as economic-financial information from some official or private sources when these were available. The main findings show that during the first years of the Socialism of the 21st-century model there were important advances in terms of social demands for the whole population, which translated into improvements in food and nutritional security and helped reduce poverty. However, more recent factors –such as the decline of the oil-exporting economic activity, the deepening of the rentier state model, the rise of a rent-seeking culture, and the growing and widespread corruption, among others–, have resulted in a severe economic crisis in general, and food crisis in particular, whose most visible consequences have been general impoverishment, together with an unprecedented emigration and food and nutritional crisis, whose magnitude and consequences cannot yet be specified. The balance made shows the inadequacy of the new legal and institutional framework and the inability of the current Venezuelan Food System to meet the conditions of food availability in sufficient quantity and quality, culturally acceptable and sustainable access, which allows the population as a whole to realize the right to adequate food.