{"id":1985,"date":"2011-11-03T16:49:17","date_gmt":"2011-11-03T06:49:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/?p=1985"},"modified":"2017-07-24T18:00:54","modified_gmt":"2017-07-24T08:00:54","slug":"vestey-cattle-properties-resumed-by-venezuelan-president-hugo-chavez","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/vestey-cattle-properties-resumed-by-venezuelan-president-hugo-chavez\/","title":{"rendered":"Vestey cattle properties resumed by Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez"},"content":{"rendered":"

The British company ‘Vestey Group’\u00a0<\/a>\u00a0was founded in 1897 by brothers William and Edmund Vestey.\u00a0 Around the early 1900’s the Vestey family company had begun purchasing agricultural land in South American countries and Australia, and over the decades the company developed vertical integration – cattle stations, meatworks (eg at Wyndham [WA],\u00a0Bullocky Point\u00a0in Darwin [NT] and\u00a0Lakes Creek at Rockhampton [Qld]), canneries, butchershops\u00a0and a shipping\u00a0company (the Blue Star Line).\u00a0 Vesteys owned a huge amount of pastoral land in northern Australia, particularly in the NT and East Kimberley region of WA.\u00a0 Vestey cattle stations included: \u00a0Flora Valley, Sturt Creek, Gordon Downs, Ruby Plains, Nicholson, Louisa Downs, Spring Creek, Mistake Creek and Ord River in WA.\u00a0 (It\u00a0seems like the list of cattle stations in the East Kimberley that had never been owned by Vesteys, would\u00a0be much shorter than the list of cattle stations they owned at one time.)\u00a0 Vesteys also owned Qld stations, such as\u00a0Oban and Morestone, and valuable NT cattle stations including Kirkimbie, Waterloo, Willeroo, Glencoe (now part of Ban Ban Springs)\u00a0and Helen Springs, and Wave Hill\u00a0Station, when the Gurindji aboriginal stockmen famously walked off in 1966.\u00a0 The Vestey Group had sold\u00a0all their Australian cattle stations by the early 1990s.<\/p>\n

The Vestey family still own large cattle ranches in Venezuela, trading under the company name of ‘Agroflora’ and President Hugo Chavez has just announced that the Vestey family’s 290,000 hectares is to be taken over by the Venezuelan Government.\u00a0 The Vestey family had been negotiating with the Venezuelan Government in regard to reparation for resumed land, and according to Hugo Chavez, negotiations broke down because the Vestey family insisted on payment in U.S. dollars rather than Venezuelan dollars.<\/p>\n

The reasons given by President Chavez for the resumption of land, are related to improving social equity, food security and\u00a0environmental management.\u00a0 In recent years, a number of\u00a0significant\u00a0assets owned by other private companies have been seized by the Chavez government.<\/p>\n

For more information on the Vestey land resumption in Venezuela, see William Hayes’ ‘Meat Trade News Daily’.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The British company ‘Vestey Group’\u00a0\u00a0was founded in 1897 by brothers William and Edmund Vestey.\u00a0 Around the early 1900’s the Vestey family company had begun purchasing agricultural land in South American countries and Australia, and over the decades the company developed vertical integration – cattle stations, meatworks (eg at Wyndham [WA],\u00a0Bullocky Point\u00a0in Darwin [NT] and\u00a0Lakes Creek […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3,5,10,165],"tags":[158,161,166,172,178],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1985"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1985"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1985\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5974,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1985\/revisions\/5974"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1985"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1985"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1985"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}