Pueblo a Pueblo is a grassroots plan for organizing the production, distribution, and consumption of food that connects agricultural producers with urban dwellers.
It is an organization that brings together rural producers with urban consumers to break with the dictates of the capitalist market.
This excerpt is from an expanded article - which is part of the Communal Resistance Series - reposted from Venezuelanalysis, 14th. May 2023.
About Pueblo a Pueblo
Key spokespeople from Plan Pueblo a Pueblo [“people to people”] tell us about the philosophy driving their work.
Ricardo Miranda: Pueblo a Pueblo is an attitude, a plan, and a method that seeks to break the contradiction between the campo and the city, thus tearing down the walls that capital builds to keep sectors of the pueblo apart and isolated from each other.
The market system focuses on consumption, but production and distribution are erased from the equation. That is why Pueblo a Pueblo focuses on – and links – production, distribution, and consumption in what we call a “living economy” [economía viva]. This new kind of economy must develop outside of the dominant mechanisms of alienated consumption.
In real terms, what does this mean? The pueblo must be in control of land, seeds, and distribution mechanisms, but also of consumption. To do this we work with organized communities in barrios and in rural areas. On the city side of things, for example in the San Agustín barrio in Caracas, people come together to debate and determine the produce they need; this allows the rural producers associated with Pueblo a Pueblo to plan their production. As a result, when the crop is ready, a producers’ assembly will set the price of the products based on production costs. Then, the products are moved to collection centers. The final step is organized distribution events, such as those in San Agustín.
This does away with the intermediary, the capitalist operator that extracts value from the campesinos and overcharges those who purchase fruits and vegetables in the market. In doing so, prices go down but waste – and crop loss – also goes down.
As it turns out, the existing market is not planned, but rather the opposite: the only thing that drives the economy of capital is profit, not people’s needs. With Pueblo a Pueblo, production meets needs, and producers meet consumers in a “virtuous cycle” based on life and not capital.
For the people of Pueblo a Pueblo food is not a commodity, it is a human right, so the plan brings together producers and consumers as subjects, not as pawns. In the period between the early days of Pueblo a Pueblo [around 2015] and the outbreak of the pandemic, we had nearly 300 planned distribution events.
There, the prices were established in a transparent process where nobody got rich off the work of third parties.