On the brink, Venezuela stares at 720% inflation

Feb 10 2016 : The Times of India (Chennai)

On the brink, Venezuela stares at 720% inflation

Nicholas Casey - 88% Christian Population Country

Puerto Cabello: NYT NEWS SERVI CE





In the capital, water is so expensive and scarce that residents wait for hours with bottles at the side of a mountain where it trickles out onto the highway . In the countryside, sugar cane fields rot, and milk factories stand idle, even as people carry bags of money around to buy food on the black market in every city and town.

  

And here in this port that once fed a nation, everything looks bare. Where a dozen ships once waited to enter, only four could be seen from a hilltop fort built long ago to guard against raids from the sea. No one would pillage Puerto Cabello today . There is nothing to take anymore.
And it is all about to get much worse. Inflation is expected to hit 720% this year, the highest in the world, making Venezuela reminiscent of Zimbabwe at the start of its collapse.The price of oil, this country's lifeblood, has collapsed to lows not seen in more than a decade.In Venezuela -a country where hospitals already lack syringes, supermarkets struggle to stock basic goods, and the government has declared an economic emergency while sitting upon the world's largest reserves of oil -the strains just ke ep growing.
Down the hillside in Puerto Cabello, a line formed in front of a grocery store, with hundreds of people looking for food.Many had arrived at 5.30 am, when rumour had it that a delivery truck had reached the store. At a quarter past 10, a policeman with a pistol monitored the door, letting in a dozen at a time. The day before, there were beans, flour and milk for sale. This morning, there was only cooking oil.
Ecio Corredor, who stood in line, said he lost his job in November. Ironically , he said, he used to drive the goods from the docks to the supermarkets.
“There are no more shipments now,“ he said.
From the coast, we started inland, a journey that began with the discovery of black gold. Not of oil, of which there is plenty in Venezuela, but of black beans. There are almost none in this country .
Few producers make them anymore for the fixed government price. Octavio Medina bought them for 50 times that price and still sold them for an additional markup on the street.Fields where beans grew were fallow; there had been shortages of fertiliser this year, too.As far as the eye could see, we were surrounded by tall weeds.
And the milk. There is none of that either, especially not at La Batalla, an operation that once produced 126,000 litres between three factories annually a decade ago.