FOOD: Something's Rotten in Venezuela

• by Humberto Márquez (caracas)
• Monday, June 07, 2010
• Inter Press Service

'One might think it is carelessness or negligence. If that is the case, there should be a sanction, but it could also be corruption,' President Hugo Chávez said last week as the scandal emerged. 'We will get to the bottom of this case,' he pledged in his weekly Sunday column.

Some 35,000 tonnes of beef, pork and chicken, milk and dairy products, vegetable oil, flour, sugar and salt were in 1,200 shipping containers found abandoned in Puerto Cabello, a port 150 kilometres northwest of Caracas.

A similar quantity was found in another 1,100 trucks several months ago in a lot in Venezuela's central plains.

Food Minister Félix Osorio said Friday that not all the food is necessarily expired, and some shipments may be recovered for human or animal consumption. Meanwhile, private sources calculate the losses at more than 70,000 tonnes.

'It's a shame that food is lost as a result of irresponsible actions of who knows which officials, when there are so many people going hungry and searching from market to market to see if they can afford to buy everything they need,' Aminta Sánchez, a nurse who lives with her daughters and a son- in-law in the densely populated west side of Caracas, told IPS.

According to official figures, at least six percent of Venezuelan population suffers from malnutrition -- about the same percentage that the government says lives in extreme poverty.

The spoiled food was imported by the government-run PDVAL, a food production and distribution company, created in 2008 as a subsidiary of the giant PDVSA, the national oil company, to take advantage of the latter's power and structure.

Luis Pulido, president of PDVAL in 2009, was arrested Tuesday and charged with corruption as the Attorney General's Office opened investigations into the case.

Chávez quickly absolved Energy Minister and PDVSA president Rafael Ramírez and ordered him to launch a 'counterattack against the oligarchy,' the opposition elite who he blames for manipulating the situation, noting that the volume of food lost 'is less than one percent of the flow of foods that do reach the people.'

Food Minister Osorio noted than in the seven years this government-run system has existed, which includes PDVAL and other networks, it has provided 10.6 million tonnes of food, of which about seven million tonnes were imported products.

Together, the Venezuelan government and private sector import about 8 billion dollars in food annually. The main imports are milk, butter, cheese, beef, chicken, vegetable oils, flour, sugar, maize and beans, as well as products that used to be Venezuelan exports, such as coffee, which now comes from Nicaragua.

The leading suppliers of food are the United States, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Ecuador, Bolivia and, until political tensions erupted last year, Colombia.

'Other countries consume meat or whiskey because they produce them. We consume them because we have petroleum, which gives us money to spend on them,' said Natalia Sánchez, director of sociological and anthropological studies at the University of Zulia, in western Venezuela.

The government, which preaches food security, in the last three years has intervened in numerous farms of all sizes and in agro-industrial companies, both domestic and foreign. It has also shut down or fined everyone from major supermarket chains to modest butcher shops, all to ensure the availability of inexpensive food.

It has also provided financing to cooperatives and rural collectives under government management, established on formerly private rural estates. In some sectors, such as soybeans, production has expanded, but in others, output has decreased, or fallen far short of the goals announced at the beginning of the planting season.

Annualised inflation for food stands at 41 percent, according to the Central Bank of Venezuela, and although the government's National Institute of Statistics says the minimum salary -- about 250 dollars a month -- covers the basic food basket, trade union organisations say at least twice that sum is needed.

For several months each year, there are shortages in the government's grocery stores of meat and dairy products, oils, flour, cereals and sugar. These items can be found in the informal street markets, but at twice the price.

In part, the difficulties are related to the rupture of trade ties with neighbouring Colombia as a result of diplomatic and political disputes. Colombia was a big supplier of meat, dairy and potatoes.

The Chávez administration has focused efforts on reaching the low-income population through 19,000 grocery stores across the country. Osorio noted that the system employs 31,000 people and has the capacity to store 600,000 tonnes of food in dry and refrigerated facilities.

It also has 61 silos, 34 packing plants and a fleet of 3,800 vehicles.

'What has occurred is proof of inefficiency. The management of containers in a port, for example, is a complex operation, which requires experience and expertise that haven't been developed among the official entities that began operating last year,' a business leader in Puerto Cabello, who requested anonymity, told IPS.

Henrique Salas Feo, a member of the political opposition and governor of Carabobo state, where Puerto Cabello is located, said that 'mafias entrenched with the government have a nice deal, which begins with obtaining cash at preferential rates to buy the food, which then never reaches the people, but they pay dozens of dollars a day for each container parked' at the port.

Since 2008, the pro-Chávez, anti-corruption group AIPO has denounced in an Internet campaign the 'corruption and influence peddling in PDVAL.'

Despite the setback of tonnes of spoiled food, the government is keeping up its offensive against private producers or operators in the food sector.

Chávez has repeatedly threatened to take over Empresas Polar, Venezuela's largest private corporate group and the leading producer of beer, corn flour (used to make 'arepa,' a staple bread on Venezuelan dinner tables), as well as other grains, fats and a variety of beverages.

© Inter Press Service (2010) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service

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