CARACAS (Reuters) – Venezuela will buy a group of large farms and thousands of cattle from a British company, President Hugo Chavez said late on Friday, part of his socialist drive to redistribute land in the South American nation.
Chavez has made land reform a central part of his aim of remolding Venezuela as a socialist society and the government has taken over millions of acres in the last five years.
“We will soon be taking control of all the farms that since 1909 belonged to the English company, Agroflora. When? I have already given the green light,” Chavez said.
Agroflora is the Venezuelan subsidiary of the Vestey Group, a meat products company owned by Britain’s Vestey family with an annual turnover of $770 million (500 million pounds).
“We will pay them of course … what they invested here during more than a century,” he said.
Venezuela took over four Vestey farms in 2005.
The new takeovers affect 740,000 acres (300,000 hectares) of farmland and 120,000 cattle, Agriculture Minister Juan Carlos Loyo said.
