Dark Humor From Socialist Hellhole Venezuela

Back in 2015, I mocked Venezuelan socialism because it led to shortages of just about every product. Including toilet paper.
But maybe that doesn’t matter. After all, if people don’t have anything to eat, they probably don’t have much need to visit the bathroom.
The Washington Post reports that farmers are producing less and less food because of government intervention, even though the nation is filled with hungry people.
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.
…’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.’ Several of his cavernous henhouses sit empty because, Escobar said, he can’t afford to buy more chicks or feed. Government price controls have made his business unprofitable…the country is facing a dietary calamity. With medicines scarce and malnutrition cases soaring, more than 11,000 babies died last year, sending the infant mortality rate up 30 percent, according to Venezuela’s Health Ministry.
… 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 percent of children under age 5 suffering from moderate to severe malnutrition… 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 hunger almost unheard-of… Venezuela’s disaster is man-made, economists point out – the result of farm nationalizations, currency distortions and a government takeover of food distribution. … The price controls have become a powerful disincentive in rural Venezuela. ‘There are no profits, so we produce at a loss,’ said one dairy farmer.

This post was published at Zero Hedge on Sep 27, 2017.