Venezuela: Where flour, pasta and milk can cost a month's pay

CNN ^ | August 2, 2016 | Flora Charner and Rachel Clarke

[T-Bone Texan]

Thank you for that. My day is complete.

Not completely good, but complete.

[Carriage Hill]

I'm still chuckling, every time I look at that can. And I still can't figure out what an inverted PR is.

[sheana]

He came here because of his job. The company he works for is here. He his wife and grown daughter. All very nic people.

[Billthedrill]

Knowing I'd regret it I clicked on the "What Went Wrong In Venezuela?" link. Yep, it's CNN - the word "socialism" was absent. Their explanation? (1) Oil price decline, (2) No dollars for imports, (3) Price controls, (4) World's highest inflation rate. Buried in (3) was this gem:

And while that is affordable for consumers, the price of flour and other key items is below the cost of production -- so domestic producers have stopped making it.

To expand on that a little but significant bit: the price is below the cost of production whether the producer is private or the government. Sending people out in the fields for 60 days at a time as slave mandatory "volunteer" labor isn't going to save the cost of that labor, since those people have to be fed even if they aren't paid. And incidentally, it takes quite a bit more than 60 days to grow a crop of wheat, harvest it, mill it, package it, and distribute it for sale. Six months for spring wheat, eleven for winter wheat. You can do a lot of starving in the intervening time.

The article was full of praise for how Chavez cut poverty and raised literacy in the first weeks of the great plundering of the Venezuelan economy. How that led to starvation...well, it's a great mystery, isn't it?

[Tilted Irish Kilt]

Prepper Ping List -
"Venezuela: Where flour, pasta and milk can cost a month's pay"

(from the CNN article):" Supplies are so limited that CNN recently found a 1 kg bag of dried pasta selling for an astronomical 200 times its official price in Caracas."

"Getting the food on the black market is illegal and can be dangerous. And it is just too expensive for so many people in Venezuela.
Just buying these three staples -- one bag each of flour, pasta and milk powder -- could swallow up almost an entire month's pay for those on minimum wage, about 15,000 to 20,000 bolivares.
And that's why, of course, so many people have no option but to go to the public supermarket for their subsidized food. There are stringent rules. they try to work out which store may have what they need, then stand in line for hours upon hours, and still they may come out with next to nothing." .. going to the black market sellers known pejoratively as "bachaqueros" or profiteers, is not feasible. "I make between 12,000 and 15,000 bolivares a month. If I buy from the bachaqueros, my whole salary is blown on three kilos of rice."

[metmom]

There’s a lot to be said for living in the country, having a vegetable garden, and knowing how to can and pressure can.

[Tilted Irish Kilt]

The CNN article continues, and is well worth a study,
and includes graphics as well as more information.

The fact that factory workers are being ordered into the fields indicates how dire the situation really is.
This is an example of the results from Socialism and a Totalitarian government.

[LucyT]

We won’t be able to afford flour, pasta, nor milk, either.

New headlines:

Clinton is going to raise taxes on the middle class.......

http://www.bluegrasspundit.com/2016/08/the-truth-slips-out-hillary-clinton.html

[tbw2]

Is that real?

[Carriage Hill]

Snopes says “probably”
http://www.snopes.com/photos/food/bonelesspork.asp

Chinese overseas restaurants use them:
http://wmbriggs.com/post/2926/

They also bleach and slice it into rings, and call it ‘calamari’.

He6h.

[greeneyes]

Thanks for the ping.