Posted on 10/03/2020 4:12:08 AM PDT by Libloather
Ana Nuñez, a 62-year-old retired municipal worker in western Venezuela, says her meals often consist of just a few corn-flour pancakes, known as arepas.
Even when she has money to buy groceries in the city of Maracaibos teeming flea market, she said that instead of quality food they sell garbage, like animal hides and rotten cheese.
A widespread scarcity of gasoline is the latest blow to domestic food production in Venezuela, preventing goods from getting to market and farmers from filling up their tractors. Food production in this oil-rich nation, led by its socialist president, Nicolas Maduro, had already been hobbled by shortages of seeds and agrochemicals, price controls that made raising crops unprofitable and government seizures of farms and food-processing plants.
Venezuelans arent the only ones going hungry. Across Latin America the economic blow caused by the Covid-19 pandemic has thrown millions out of work and into poverty. From Mexico City to Santiago, people are skipping meals, lining up at soup kitchens and begging, United Nations agencies say.
But conditions in Venezuela, which even before the pandemic was suffering the worst economic meltdown in its history, are by far the most dire.
A recent U.N.-sponsored report described Venezuela as having the fourth-worst food crisis in the world, behind only war-ravaged Yemen, Afghanistan and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
(Excerpt) Read more at wsj.com ...
Back in the '80s, I worked for a rent-a-rig company and was sent down to one of their oil camps in Venezuela. On a flight from Caracas to Barcelona (it was called something else back then) I talked with a local.
We were flying over boondocks and the guy said that it used to be farmland until oil was discovered and ruined everything. Said they used to grow everything and now even beef was imported from Argentina.
The place reminded me of America in the 1890s in that there were loads of Americans free-wheeling in oil and there was an energetic air around you.
But, signs were already on the horizon. I talked with an expat who ran a ferry service out to the rigs in Lake Maracaibo who said Venezuela was headed for Third World status if things didn't straighten out. They didn't.
And your point is ????
“That’s Nacho Cheese!”
IIRC it was “fresh cheese” being made by a local business. But the point is you can get sick from bad cheese.
It started with power outages like what is happening in California right now.
Forgot this?
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