Let them eat Chavismo

NEWS that the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) had given Venezuela a diploma for its “notable and exceptional” efforts to curb hunger did not reach Joseína Rodríguez. Recently unemployed, and living with her family in a farm outhouse in the south-west of the country, she was too busy working out where her next meal was coming from. “Joseína” (not her real name) helps run one of the community councils that are the building blocks of the “socialist revolution” set up by the late President Hugo Chávez. “Chávez used to say that with the revolution everything would keep getting better,” she sighs. “I don’t know why this president (his successor, Nicolás Maduro) hasn’t kept the promise.” Sitting on an upturned bucket in the dusty yard of a farm that was taken over (before Chávez) by its workers, she says she used to work making meals for her neighbours, but stopped “because they can’t pay the prices I have to charge.” Staples reaching her community via the main state-subsidised food network cover only 200 of the 1,000 families who are supposed to benefit. More…