VENEZUELA - Chavez on Economy

As Venezuela's president Hugo Chavez has become the inofficial
speaker of a Latin American Alliance (*) that comprises some of the
continent's most important countries ruled by socialist governments
and in the frame of Venezuela holding the greatest reserves of crude
oil worldwide, it should be interesting to hear what Chavez says
about the latest development of his country's economy. Here are
some quotations from his speech held before the National Assembly
of Venezuela [TELESUR, Caracas, Jan. 18, 2011; Translation Spanish-
English by Ulysses]

"It is necessary to achieve control over [national] expenses
in order to fight speculation."
This is hinting at, both, the market prices of food stuff and,
as well, all expenses on behalf of the government.

"Venezuela must turn into a power of agriculture [ and such
enlarge its power as a country that is providing crude oil ]."
As to the planned development of agriculture, livestock
breeding and the fishing industry have been particularly
named.

Referring to the decay of economy during the last two years
2009 and 2010, Chavez said:

"We finally regained the path of economic growth."

"I did not forget the four years of 2005, 2006, 2007 and 2008
when Venezuela was the number one place of economic growth
in Latin America if not one of the first places worldwide. What
came then, was the impact of dropping prices for crude oil,
the dropping of oil production, the climatic effect. - And facing
such situation, now, some are saying that the reason of economic
decay is nationalization or rather socialism. - No, this is not
the reason !"
When hinting at the climatic effect, he was referring to latest
enormous floodings and earlier consequences of the notorious
climate effect called El Niño.

Finally, Chavez pointed out that minimum wages of workers in
his country have risen for about 20% this year.

The following video contains additional information on
Venezuela's recent economic development in the frame
of an interview TELESUR held with Orangel Rivas, an
expert of Venezuela's National Institute of Statistics. It's
about consumption and employment during the last two
years.


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(*) At present, that alliance of Latin American states is
including Argentine, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Ecuador,
Nicaragua and Venezuela, all countries being ruled by left-
wing governments.