Mantecal, Venezuela - Deep in Venezuela's sweltering heartland, a gleaming dairy plant sits idle, a testament to missteps that are slowing President Hugo Chavez's drive to make his oil-rich nation self-sufficient in food.
Dozens of workers sluice water to keep pipes clean, ready to churn out milk and cheese, but the site has barely operated since a team of Iranian technicians built it 10 months ago.
What may seem an obvious obstacle has yet to be overcome - too few dairy cows are raised in the harsh plains where the dairy is located to provide enough milk to keeping it running.
"It's like they put their pants on before their underwear," says Humberto Taquiva, a cobbler who is also an agricultural adviser in the tiny plains town of Mantecal, trying to persuade farmers to produce milk for the plant.
With food prices at all-time highs and hurt by sporadic shortages of basic products last year, Chavez is determined to reduce Venezuela's dependence on costly food imports and make its fields more productive.
"Some day Venezuela will export food," the Leftist president said last week during a visit to a newly irrigated maize farm in the state of Barinas, where new tractors worked the land.
Venezuela is a lush country but agriculture collapsed when oil derricks crowded out coffee and cocoa farms in the 1920s.
It is now one of Latin America's few net food importers. Oil wealth contributes to a strong currency, so imports are often cheaper than home produce.
There is little doubt Chavez is paying more attention to the countryside than any government in a generation.
Harvests of many crops have risen steadily since he took office.
Farming "was totally abandoned", says peasant farmer leader Andres Tuesta.
"This is a serious attempt to diversify the economy."
But cases like the empty dairy in the town of Mantecal show bad planning, along with an overvalued currency, have slowed Chavez's drive to make the fertile land roduce more.
Food shortages are a tinderbox issue everywhere in the world. Anger at long lines for milk contributed to Chavez's defeat in a referendum on extending his powers last year.
Chavez, who says high food prices show capitalism is a failed system, has sheltered consumers from rising world food costs with subsidies and price controls.
Some products have still been scarce as world supplies tighten and domestic demand rises.
Worried by the shortages, Chavez this year cut red tape on imports and opened state-run food stores. The lines shrank.
The government bought one of the largest local milk firms last month to stop farmers selling milk for cheese, which has fewer price controls than milk, or shipping it to Colombia.
Chavez aims to double national output by 2012 by creating new dairy regions at sites such as Mantecal in the sparsely populated state of Apure, which has several times more cattle than people but whose ranchers have traditionally produced cattle for meat.
Its hot, swampy flatlands are inhospitable to the average dairy cow and locals were taken aback when an Iranian team arrived last year to install the dairy plant in their town.
White elephant
"They didn't do the financing, the training, the establishing of pastures or the infrastructure to guarantee the production to supply the plant," says Taquiva, with a note of exasperation.
In an area where anacondas and piranhas fill rivers, the sweltering heat and vicious bugs will knock down high-yield European cows.
Chavez says he wants to put industrial plants in remote areas to spread wealth across the Caribbean nation. But the white elephant raises shrugs in Mantecal whenever it is mentioned.
Stories of similar shortsightedness abound in Chavez's self-styled revolution, such as the project in Lara state where farmers grow tomatoes but roads from villages are so bad they cannot get them to market in good condition.
Tuesta helped organise farmers to receive land redistributed by Chavez's government under an agrarian reform in the past several years. He says there is a long way to go before Venezuela becomes self-sufficient in food.
He blames the shortages on sabotage and hoarding by Venezuelan elites opposed to Chavez, but corruption and bureaucracy have also slowed production increases.
Last month Chavez said he was committed to turning underdeveloped states like Apure into major milk producers.
Tougher breeds of cattle are being tested and the government plans to introduce water buffalo, which are commonly used in Brazil to produce milk.
But after two years in planning, there are no buffalo, and even Chavez acknowledges the problems.
"We've got some great projects, but we're still missing a ton of things," he said.