This is a cross-post by Paul Canning
“Malnourished children who faint in class. Children who, in the worst cases, die from hunger, their bodies nothing but skin and bones, the outlines of their ribs visible.
Images like those have become common in Venezuela, where critical food shortages are pushing hundreds of thousands of children under a blanket of misery and hunger more often seen in the poorest countries in Africa.”
Hunger haunts Venezuela, especially its children, Miami Herald, August 5, 2016.
For months images of starving Venezuelan children, reports of food riots, of the very poorest banging pots on the streets demanding food and desperate parents hunting for medicine for their children have appeared in Western media.
Ordinary people are now being randomly snatched out of the huge food lines, arrested and labelled saboteurs by a government desperate to blame anyone else but themselves.
President Maduro has joked about the food crisis. [clip can be viewed on Paul’s original post]
Nothing new
These images of starvation are not new, although the media attention is. Last June The Economist reported evidence that Chavismo’s vaunted alleviation of poverty and food insecurity had reversed.
Marianella Herrera, a nutritionist at the Fundación Bengoa, a private foundation, calls official data partial and inconsistent. “Other studies show an increase in malnutrition,” she says. “Children are showing up in hospital emergency wards with severe malnutrition, and some are dying because of a lack of basic supplies.” The government’s own figures, which show it reached the UN target for reducing malnutrition in children by 2008, indicate that by 2013 Venezuela was close to crossing the line again, in the opposite direction.
 |
| From The Economist, June 2015. |
June 2015 was also the time of the last recorded comment (that I am aware of) by Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn on Venezuela, at a rally organised by the Venezuela Solidarity Campaign (VSC). In March 2016 he deleted a slew of content from his website including this pro-Chavismo article.
Do read Paul’s post in full here
