#Chavez's promises, "seemed like a revolutionary idea. Now we're starving."
Great investigative piece from Reuters on the corruption that developed from / led to the alliance between Venezuela and China...
"The diversification [into Food production] made PDVSA the conduit through which contracts, and a growing sum of money administered by Venezuela's national development bank, were awarded. By 2010, the filings say, the bank had received $32 billion from the China Development Bank and another $6 billion from an infrastructure fund created by Chavez."
SPECIAL REPORT-How a Chinese venture in Venezuela made millions while locals grew hungry
(For more Reuters Special Reports, click on)
By Angus Berwick
TUCUPITA, Venezuela, May 7 (Reuters) - The project was meant to feed millions.
In Delta Amacuro, a remote Venezuelan state on the Caribbean Sea, a Chinese construction giant struck a bold agreement with the late President Hugo Chavez. The state-run firm would build new bridges and roads, a food laboratory, and the largest rice-processing plant in Latin America.
The 2010 pact, with China CAMC Engineering Co Ltd , would develop rice paddies twice the size of Manhattan and create jobs for the area's 110,000 residents, according to a copy of the contract seen by Reuters.
The underdeveloped state was an ideal locale to demonstrate the Socialist Venezuelan government's commitment to empower the poor. And the deal would show how Chavez and his eventual hand-picked successor, President Nicolas Maduro, could work with China and other allies to develop areas beyond Venezuela's bounteous oil beds.
"Rice Power! Agricultural power!" Chavez tweeted at the time.
Nine years later, locals are hungry. Few jobs have materialized and the plant is only half-built, running at less than one percent its projected output. It hasn't yielded a single grain of locally grown rice, according to a dozen people involved in or familiar with the development.
Yet CAMC and a select few Venezuelan partners prospered.
Venezuela paid CAMC at least $100 million for the stalled development, according to project contracts and sealed court documents from an investigation by prosecutors in Europe.
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