Venezuela, an Oil-Producing Country Where Corn Is Grown

Venezuelan Minister of Agriculture, Wilmar Castro Soteldo, highlighted the participation of foreign entrepreneurs in these new ventures.

The green color of the plantations seems infinite in Portuguesa, one of the western states of Venezuela, where 35% of the white and yellow corn consumed in the Caribbean nation is produced.

“I graduated in 2018, but I have been working with my father since I was a child, a great teacher, empirical knowledge, but very valuable to put it into practice here, and make a great complement to the empirical with the scientific that the university gave me, and the empirical my father gave me,” he tells telesSUR while inspecting the grains in the cornfield of the private farm Los Manires. He explores every inch of the crop.

The cachapa is typical of Venezuelan gastronomy, it has the shape of a tortilla, it is eaten at any time, it is prepared with yellow corn, it is ground, sugar is added, and traditionally it is filled with cheese, although the combination depends on taste. The Chaima Indians were the first to prepare it.

Venezuela is the country with the largest oil reserves in the world, but the sanctions imposed by the U.S. do not allow them to access a large part of the profits they receive from crude oil, the bet is to diversify, and here, among so many cereals, enters corn, its production, this year alone, increased by 52%.

“We already have businessmen from Argentina, businessmen from Turkey, from Uruguay who are already planting in alliance with our producers, it was not that they came here and grabbed the land, no, no, it is with our producers, financing that production, which was one of the crooked legs we had of the financing, because if we did not have income how the h… we would be financing, no?” The Venezuelan Minister of Agriculture, Wilmar Castro Soteldo, explains it while recording his weekly program on agriculture in the middle of the countryside.

So, in the country of oil, corn is also grown.

Tags: Venezuela, yellow corn, white corn