Malnutrition Confirmed in Venezuela
Recently my former research assistant on Venezuela,
Antulio Rosales, forwarded me a report by Anabella Abadi in an English-language
website called Caracas Chronicles. The
report is called “Caritas Study finds Childhood Hunger Racing to Crisis Levels,”
and it summarizes the finding of the Catholic organization, Caritas Venezuela,
which surveyed children in several of the poorest regions of Venezuela. You can
find Abadi’s article here.
The gist of this report is that in Venezuela, once
the richest country in Latin America, childhood malnutrition in some of the
poorest areas of the country has now reached levels of what is called GAM,
global acute malnutrition. When ten per cent of kids are malnourished, a region
is at the serious level; when fifteen per cent are malnourished, it’s at the
critical level. In twenty-five of the poorest parishes that Caritas surveyed,
GAM was at 8.9 per cent between October and December 2016. Many of these parishes
are isolated, with poor access to public services and high rates of poverty.
I have been following Venezuela for several years,
and have posted blogs on the situation there on several occasions. You can
access them here:
I’ve also written an article in Human Rights Quarterly (volume 37, no.4, 2015, pp. 1024-45) on Venezuela,
which you can access on-line or email me for a copy at hassmann@wlu.ca.
And I’ve discussed Venezuela in my recent book, State Food Crimes (Cambridge University Press, 2016).
At the time I sent my book to the press in October
2015, I had read one report about malnutrition and was worried about what might
happen: now I know that it is quite widespread.
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| Nicolas Maduro |
Conveniently, the government of Venezuela no longer
releases statistics that could damage its international reputation. According
to Abadi’s article, the last time the government released data on childhood
malnutrition was in 2007, just at the time that food shortages started. UN data
is out of date. And it’s even more worrisome that the Food and Agriculture
Organization gave President Nicolás Maduro an award in 2013 for reducing
malnutrition, when there was already plenty of evidence of food shortages. Maduro
became President in 2013 after Hugo Chávez, the President whose policies
started the food crisis, died.
As Abadi’s article said, the problem is not the low
price of oil (which is often reported as the cause of food shortages, at least
on CBC radio). And it’s not because of weather events. It’s because of incompetence,
corruption, and an evolving dictatorship. For over a decade now the government
has controlled the price of food; these prices are so low that many food producers
and distributors have gone out of business. The government has also
expropriated productive ranches and farms. I personally know a Venezuelan
refugee here in Canada whose family’s ranch was expropriated, and now nothing
is produced on it at all.
Food is rationed with guards standing outside supermarkets;
people have to show their ID to get in and can only shop on certain days of the
week. Sometimes they have to be willing
to give biometric information as well. People line up for hours, sometimes for
days, hoping to find food. There isn’t enough milk for babies.
More
and more people are moving to other countries to find food. There’s also a
thriving smuggling industry where Venezuelans buy food at low prices in
Venezuela itself, sell it across the border to Colombia where the price is
raised, then other Venezuelans travel to Colombia to buy it back.
Corruption
eats up enormous amounts of food, whose distribution is controlled by the
military. Exporters to Venezuela have to
pay huge bribes; so do importers, truckers, buyers, local vendors, and everyone
else in the supply chain. If you don’t pay the bribes, food is left to rot in
plain sight of starving citizens. You can see a detailed article about this
corruption here:
According to Abadi’s article, recently a high school
student confronted President Maduro to complain that the lunch program at her
school had been cancelled. In a show of supreme indifference, Maduro replied by
asking her what she personally was doing to solve the food crisis, saying
(according to Antulio’s translation) “You cannot just make a request, you have
to mobilize, go to the streets so that your word is heard.” Maduro’s comment is ironic, given that the
government has become increasingly repressive, jailing and torturing political
opponents.
One of the problems here is that the international
community can do so little to help Venezuelans. There’s no international law
that says a country’s rulers can’t mess up the economy if they want to. There’s
no option of humanitarian intervention. Maduro and his clique don’t care at all
about international human rights law. The best option to pressure them is
through the Organization of American States and other Latin American organizations,
but so far that hasn’t stopped or even modified the corruption around food
distribution.
Malnutrition in Venezuela is entirely avoidable. A
brutal, callous, stupid and corrupt leader supported by equally awful advisors
caused it and perpetuates it. I don’t know whether Maduro is personally making
money from oil revenues and food rations, but a lot of other people are. At
best, he is an ignorant thug.
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