GatoGordo
GatoGordo's JournalNo food in the land of plenty. The Venezuela Paradox
Venezuela’s paradox: People are hungry, but farmers can’t feed them
The Washington Post
Mariana Zuñiga, Nick Miroff
3 days ago
"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.”
Several of his cavernous henhouses sit empty because, Escobar said, he can’t afford to buy more feed. 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 than 11,000 babies died last year, sending the infant mortality rate up 30 percent, according to Venezuela’s Health Ministry. The head of the ministry was fired by President Nicolás Maduro two days after she released those statistics."
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Read more: http://www.msn.com/en-ae/news/world/venezuela%E2%80%99s-paradox-people-are-hungry-but-farmers-can%E2%80%99t-feed-them/ar-BBBzVmT
Maduro's "bad debt" equivalent of 48% interest on backs of Venezuelans
Venezuela's political opposition finds a new weapon against its leftist dictator
Tom DiChristopher, Wilfred Frost
3 Hours Ago
"Venezuela's opposition party is refining a new weapon against the government of embattled President Nicolas Maduro: threatening that the country's lenders may not get their money back after Maduro is removed from power.
The leader of Venezuela's National Assembly, Julio Borges, criticized Goldman Sachs after the company bought the distressed debt of PDVSA, the country's state-owned oil company. Borges suggested that a future government might not honor the bonds.
The letter accuses Goldman of "making a quick buck off the suffering Venezuelan people" by helping to prop up the Maduro regime. Venezuela's government has mismanaged the country's economy, leading to severe food shortages and staggering inflation, but despite those hardships it has continued to make debt payments."
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http://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/30/venezuelan-opposition-threatens-not-to-repay-bonds.html
Venezuela's corrupt Chavistas shamed abroad
Venezuela socialists met shaming, protests on trips abroad
By ADRIANA GOMEZ LICON AND JOSHUA GOODMAN, ASSOCIATED PRESS MIAMI
May 30, 2017, 11:21 AM ET
"Javier Fungairino was eating breakfast with his son at a bakery one recent morning when he noticed a familiar face at a nearby table: a former minister of Venezuela's socialist government whose presence reminded him of the pain he suffered when he left his homeland for Miami three years ago.
"I knew it was him," the 43-year-old Venezuelan businessman said of the encounter this month. "But the first thing I asked was, 'Are you Eugenio Vasquez?', and he said, 'Yes.'"
Immediately, an angry mob of scolding Venezuelan exiles surrounded the former head of state-run Banco de Venezuela, shouting "Rat!" and "Get out, thief!" until Vasquez and another man with him fled.
"I never laid a finger on him. I simply raised my voice," Fungairino said. "They hate when people complain. They think they're so powerful that they're not used to that kind of treatment.""
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http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/venezuela-exiles-hound-shame-socialist-officials-abroad-47715264
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