In June 2014, a little over a year after the election of President Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela, global oil prices tanked — and with them the Venezuelan economy, which was then, as now, largely reliant on oil exports. In the years since, inflation has risen so high that over half of its population of 29 million people cannot afford basic provisions. Michael Fakhri, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, visited Venezuela in February 2024 to meet with government officials, activists, civil society groups, and food producers. His preliminary report confirmed what organizers both within and outside of Venezuela have long maintained: that harsh U.S. sanctions are a primary force driving the persistence of Venezuela’s food crisis. These “unilateral coercive measures,” Fakhri wrote in his report, “are cruel and vicious and hinder realization of the right to food.” 

The Venezuelan government has had a tense relationship with that of the United States since the late socialist President Hugo Chávez came to power in 1999. In addition to criticizing the War on Terror, Chávez consolidated state power and nationalized U.S.-owned companies, seizing their assets and using the revenue to execute land redistribution programs and construct social housing as part of what he named the Bolivarian Revolution. Venezuela has been under varying degrees of U.S. sanction since 2006, when President George W. Bush banned commercial arms sales to the country, accusing Chávez of not sufficiently cooperating with U.S. counterterrorism and counternarcotics efforts. During President Trump’s first term, the sanctions dramatically intensified, targeting Venezuela’s oil industry and decimating government revenues. All these measures, according to Fakhri, have “constrained the government’s fiscal ability to implement their social protection programmes and deliver basic public services.” Trump has doubled down since his return to office, adding a 25 percent tariff to all U.S. imports from countries that buy Venezuelan oil and banning Chevron, the one U.S. company with a limited license to operate in partnership with Venezuela’s state-run oil and gas company, from making its mandatory payments to the country.

Meanwhile, Chavista activists have mobilized to feed the Venezuelan people. The Pueblo a Pueblo (PAP) initiative, founded in 2015, aims to cut out extractive middlemen and connect agricultural producers in the campo, or countryside, directly with urban consumers. As PAP spokesperson Ricardo Miranda put it in a 2023 interview, “Pueblo a Pueblo is an attitude, a plan, and a method that seeks to break the contradiction between the campo and the city.” Since its inception, the program has partnered with nearly three hundred schools across seven Venezuelan states to supply food to more than one hundred thousand students. Organizers estimate that between 2015 and 2020, the network delivered four million kilograms of food grown on thousands of communes across Venezuela directly to hungry communities. 

PAP, which continues the type of participatory practices that have long been a hallmark of the ongoing Bolivarian Revolution, has helped supplement the work of government initiatives like CLAP, a program launched by Maduro in 2016 to provide subsidized monthly food boxes to Venezuelans. As Fakhri noted, while CLAP has been a “lifeline” for millions of families, it was never meant to be more than an “interim measure.” In response to pressure from grassroots organizers, the government has increased its support for the communes, many of which were established during the Chávez years. A 2022 directive pledged the transfer of infrastructural assets to communal projects, and in 2024 Maduro appointed Ángel Prado, the leader of El Maizal Commune in western Venezuela, as minister of communes. The same year, the government enlisted help from Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement to develop a massive agricultural project in partnership with Venezuela’s Communard Union. They will grow food and rear cattle on 180,000 hectares of land that was expropriated from large-scale private landowners in 2008.

In 2020, speaking on behalf of El Maizal Commune before his appointment to public office, Prado said that commune organizers “have indeed been very critical of some policies of our government…. But we take a firm position supporting our government as long as it maintains an unwavering stance against imperialism.” Despite the difficulties of the food crisis, he continued, “we have refused to allow U.S. imperialism to put its boots here. I think it’s a very important victory on the part of the Venezuelan people.” This year, the Trump administration has escalated regime change efforts in Venezuela, bombing fishing boats in international waters and threatening to strike Venezuelan military facilities — all the while justifying these moves with spurious accusations that the Maduro government is leading a vast narco-trafficking conspiracy. U.S. sanctions have already destroyed Venezuela’s ability to feed its people. The solution lies not in regime change, but with the organizers who are working to meet the needs of their communities now — while maintaining the dream of socialist revolution.