Farmers can’t feed hungry Venezuelans
With no hard currency, farms unable to import feed, turn to low-quality black market
YUMA, VENEZUELA— With cash running low and debts piling up, Venezuela’s socialist government has cut back sharply on food imports. And for farmers in most countries, that would present an opportunity.
But this is Venezuela, whose economy operates on its own special plane of dysfunction. At a time of empty supermarkets and spreading hunger, the country’s farms are producing less and less, not more, making the caloric deficit even worse.
Drive around the countryside outside the capital, Caracas, and there’s everything a farmer needs: fertile land, water, sunshine and gasoline at 4 cents a gallon, cheapest in the world. Yet somehow families here are just as scrawny-looking as the city-dwelling Venezuelans waiting in bread lines or picking through garbage for scraps.
Having attempted for years to defy conventional economics, the country now faces a painful reckoning with basic arithmetic.
“Last year I had 200,000 hens,” said Saulo Escobar, who runs a poultry and hog farm here in the state of Aragua, an hour outside Caracas. “Now I have 70,000.”
Government price controls have made his business unprofitable, and armed gangs have been squeezing him for extortion payments and stealing his eggs.
Venezuela’s latest public health indicators confirm that the country is facing a dietary calamity. With medicines scarce and malnutrition cases soaring, more than11,000 babies died last year, sending the infant mortality rate up 30 per cent, according to Venezuela’s Health Ministry. The head of the ministry was fired by President Nicolas Maduro two days after she released those statistics.
Child hunger in parts of Venezuela is a “humanitarian crisis,” according to a new report by the Catholic relief organization Caritas, which found 11.4 per cent of children under the age of five suffering from moderate to severe malnutrition, and 48 per cent “at risk” of going hungry.
The protesters who have been marching in the streets against Maduro for the past seven weeks scream, “We’re hungry!” as riot police blast them with water cannons.
In a recent survey of 6,500 Venezuelan families by the country’s leading universities, three-quarters of adults said they lost weight in 2016 — an average of 19 pounds. This collective emaciation is referred to dryly here as “the Maduro diet,” but it’s a level of
“The government has made the decision to be the producer, processor and distributor, so the entire chain of food production suffers.” CARLOS MACHADO EXPERT ON VENEZUELAN AGRICULTURE
hunger almost unheard-of outside war zones or areas ravaged by hurricane, drought or plague.
Venezuela’s disaster is man-made, economists point out — the result of farm nationalizations, currency distortions and a government takeover of food distribution. While millions of Venezuelans can’t get enough to eat, officials have refused to allow international aid groups to deliver food, accustomed to viewing their oil-rich country as the benefactor of poorer nations, not a charity case.
“It’s not only the nationalization of land,” said Carlos Machado, an expert on Venezuelan agriculture. “The government has made the decision to be the producer, processor and distributor, so the entire chain of food production suffers from an inefficient agricultural bureaucracy.”
With Venezuela’s industrial output crashing, farmers are forced to import feed, fertilizer and spare parts, but they can’t do so without hard currency. And the government has been hoarding the dollars it earns from oil exports to pay back highinterest loans from Wall Street and other foreign creditors.
Escobar said he needs 400 tons of high-protein imported animal feed every three months to keep his operation running, but he’s able to get only 100 tons. So, like many others, he’s turned to the black market. But he can only afford a cheaper, less nutritious feed, meaning that his hens are smaller than they used to be — and so are their eggs.
“My quality went down, so my production went down, too,” he said.
Venezuela has long relied on imports of certain foodstuffs, such as wheat, that can’t be grown on a large scale in the country’s tropical climate. But trade statistics show that the land reform policies of the late Hugo Chavez, Maduro’s predecessor, made Venezuela more dependent on imported food than ever. Venezuelans who don’t have access to hard currency depend on governmentsubsidized groceries doled out by pro-Maduro neighbourhood groups, or wait in supermarket lines for rationed items. Those who join antigovernment protests have been threatened with losing food supplies.
Escobar, the chicken and hog farmer, said the only way for farmers to remain in business today is to break the law and sell at market prices.
If it’s not a fear of the government that keeps Escobar awake at night, it’s criminal gangs. He has been forced to make “protection” payments to a mafia boss operating out of the local prison.
“I know how to deal with chickens and pigs,” Escobar said, “but not criminals.”