Are We Producing What we Eat?

 By: Luis Britto García

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A persistent media and intellectual campaign tries to show us as a useless country, unable to produce what it consumes and totally dependent from imports. Therefore, the parasite of exporting one only and unique product: Oil. Its prices would doom us alternatively to peakes of squandering and abyss of economic depression. This feeds the myth of the "rentist" Venezuela (based on the ignorance that the economic science, from David Ricardo, accepts that the only source of "rent" is labor). The Venezuelans are blamed and convinced that we must prepare for the worst, from the unconditional delivery of our resources and even the most twisted indebtedness operations, for we don't deserve anything.

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A detailed data analysis unveils the reality. We will use the figures of the Food Balance Sheet. For decades, it has been compiled and published by the National Nutrition Institute. Also, studied and summarized for several years by the sharp Pascualina Curcio Curcio. Pascualina's conclussions are overwhelming. Similar to her previous work The Visible Hand of the Market: the Economic War in Venezuela. When studying the figures from 1980 to 2013 (latest available year), she finds that 88% of the total availability in the food production has been of approximately %88, whereas imports represent %12.

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This results will astonish readers. In case of doubt, you can check the original figures in the Food Balance Sheet. As an example, we appoint several magnitudes in approximate manner, since we verified graphics with bars. In 1980, Venezuela prodiced 22,500,000 metric tons of food, and imported 4,000,000. In 2013, it produced around 46,000,000 millions of metric tons and imported 8,000,000. That would totalize around %88  of internal production and %12 of imports.

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By year 2013, according to the same source, the food availability rose to 51 million metric tons. From them, 43 million were produced in Venezuela. Let's analyze by approximation some magnitudes. That same year we would have produced 8,100,00 metric tons of cereals, and imported around 4,800,00 tons. We produced 9,200,000 tons of sugar and honey, and imported 980,000. We produced close to 9,250,000 tons of meat and imported 400,000.

5 How is possible then the food shortage and the exponential growth of prices?Neither corn nor rice, not even the sugar cane are watered with preferential dollars. It's not possible either that in a few years a proportion of 88% of the food produced in the country has disappeared. An oligopoly of businesses and distributors leaks the products through the Venezuelan border, or sets the prices we pay for what we produce in the regions according to a quotation of foreign currencies set abroad. It doses what arrives and what does not reach the consumer. We had never suffered so much in benefit of so few. That is the origin of the scarcity, and the key to put an end to it.

Read the full article in Spanish, here: https://www.aporrea.org/economia/a261043.html

English Version: María Eugenia Acero Colomine
Twitter: @andesenfrungen
Email: acerocolomine@gmail.com
Blog: http://fantasiasneurastenicas.blogspot.com