Days of Hunger, Days of Chaos: The Coming Great Food Shortages in America

The pangs of hunger are felt through the corridors of its major businesses, behind the microphone on radio shows, in hospitals where malnutrition is climbing sharply and already claiming lives, and at schools where children faint and teachers skip classes to queue for food. For many that is simply because food is too expensive. In a cafe in downtown Caracas, he explains how his dreams shrank with his wasting body, now so emaciated that ribs and collarbones poke through a once-chubby chest. This year he has done little else. He stands 5ft 7in tall, and has lost more than a quarter of his body mass, shrinking to little over 50kg 7st 12lb since the start of the year.

During a checkup for a new job, doctors diagnosed a heart murmur caused by stress and hunger. But I had to change my decision, to literally not die of hunger. She told the new legislative super-body she heads: There is indignation and courage to defend Venezuela. But critics and economists say the crisis is both real and self-inflicted, the result of a government using a raft of imports as a shortcut to meet promises of development and food security during the heady years of an oil price boom. When crude prices began sliding in , bringing down oil earnings, it left the country short of dollars, and the government decided to focus its income on servicing the national debt rather than importing food.

The number of children with severe malnutrition who were admitted to the hospital rose from 30 in to last year, and looks set to climb further this year based on figures from the first half of the year, she said.

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There has been a subtle shifting in the nature of the problems parents face. Since the government unofficially relaxed price controls there are more supplies, but parents struggle to pay for what they need, she said. Mothers who are malnourished can struggle to breastfeed, exacerbating the problem.

Catholic charity Caritas has been among those raising the alarm, after launching a project to monitor and tackle child nutrition across four Venzeulan states. After decades tackling food crises around the world, from Pakistan to Algeria, she was horrified to find herself doing the same in her native Venezuela. But malnutrition has been rising sharply, with more than half of all children affected in some way.

Malnutrition in the youngest children can stunt development for life. The first 1, days are the most important in the life of a baby, and sets up the cognitive situation that will affect them for their whole life. She is waiting for funding to take the survey, and food support, to a wider range of provinces. It fills a gap in data left by a government that has not published statistics on nutrition for several years, and a gap in support left by failed public support programmes.

But she warns that no feeding programme can do anything more than protect individual children. Meanwhile, passengers like me continue to work out how to get their children to school, to get themselves to work or run their errands on the back of trucks. Like many other things in my life, my job has changed a lot with the Venezuela crisis. Increasing problems with electricity and internet access have made working in online news complicated. We need to have the most up-to-date information, especially for breaking news, but it's impossible because the internet connection keeps dropping off.

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Added to that is the lack of safety. When we're out on the street covering stories, we're at risk of being robbed and attacked and it's even riskier if you bring a photographer or film crew with expensive equipment. The small roadside village an hour west from Cumana recently turned into a kind of black hole for the drivers of heavy goods vehicles. Everything from deliveries of rice, juices, cold meats, corn flour, sugar and vegetable oil, up to crates of beer was taken.

The business and commercial sector of Sucre has confirmed on several occasions that one of the reasons that the lack of food has increased in the region is because of the frequent looting. Business owners across Venezuela are frightened to lose goods in transit, and while empty shelves in the supermarket are a common sight, the robberies are even more frequent. Those who live in Muelle de Cariaco claim that criminal gangs facilitate the looting and robbing of the trucks in order to get goods and sell them on at exorbitant prices.

There have been clashes with the National Guard, and security forces put up six roadblocks between Cumana and Muelle de Cariaco, but this hasn't stopped the looting. But while I was interviewing a group of women who fearfully told me that members of a criminal gang had started the looting, a man, about 30 or so years old, dressed in a shirt, shorts and sports sandals, approached us. He said that nobody should be speaking to journalists. He put his hand to his waist to indicate that he had a gun and ordered me out of the place.

In Cumana, sundries have gradually been becoming less available since , but it was in when the shelves began to empty. There was no food. It was distressing to go to a supermarket and not find one single basic item - sometimes after hours and hours of waiting in line. He will go into anaphylactic shock without them. Sometimes, we can't find any antihistamines in Cumana and need to go to other cities. I'm divorced and my son's father lives in Caracas, where he's always looking for the medicine. I also ask my friends who live in big cities to help me find medicine and then I pay them, but it is difficult.

There are government restrictions on sending medicine by courier, so we have to use other strategies - such as sending it with people we know who happen to be travelling to Cumana or sending it hidden inside magazines or books. We've done things like this to make sure the child gets his medicine.

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In June , my sister, who's only 29, suffered from an infection of the central nervous system and was near death because of a lack of antibiotics. She was hospitalised and her health declined, but they didn't have the antibiotics she needed. We tried to buy them but the few we could find were very expensive, and the amount we needed for her treatment was well beyond what we could afford. On some occasions we were ripped off, having bought "medicine" that actually contained harmful substances, but was sold as antibiotics.

Finally, our family and friends who lived in other cities helped us to find and buy some, they fundraised and got support from social media. They were difficult times, but w ith much effort and luck, we were able to save my sister.

On Tuesday, I won a small victory against the daily grind. With this money, I could pay for my son's transport to and from school for a week. I got the money without paying a percentage to the resellers, or standing in endless lines at a bank, which would only give me 20 percent of the amount, without caring if I wanted or needed more. A lady went to pay for medication with cash and I offered to pay for it with my debit card in exchange for the bills. It's all a question of luck. Sometimes, p eople say "no" or the shop owners refuse the transaction because the shop also needs cash.

Usually, I have to go to the bank at 5am and spend hours in line with no guarantee that the bank will even have any money on hand. Finding someone that sells cash isn't easy. It's a shady business because they can be fined by the authorities, although under national laws selling cash isn't a crime. A person with large sums of cash is a reseller or "bachaquero", which is the term the government use for people who sell cash, food or toiletries on the black market.

They can have their money confiscated and be arrested. The lack of cash has boosted electronic transfers by debit, credit or bank transfer. I pay for everything this way, from a kilo of bananas to a cup of coffee. After the emotionally exhausting search for cash, I can't help but remember a time not so far in the past when, if I wanted to get cash, all I had to do was go to an ATM. Shopping days and why items have three prices. For more than 10 years, there was a hardware store in Cumana run by a grey-haired Arab man. But since December , it has sold more than screws, nails and pipes.

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The owner has divided the shop into two parts: These goods have three prices, like the majority of those sold in Venezuela. It all depends on how you pay for them. If you pay cash, the cost is less. If you pay with a debit card, the price is bumped up by 10 percent and if you pay by bank transfer, the price rises by 40 percent. I always have to pay more for things than they are actually worth. With the difficulties of getting cash, I don't have the luxury of using it even to buy things like bread, because I need to put it aside for public transport.

It's the same with rice, beef, chicken, toothpaste or soap - everything has different prices. No one on the minimum wage in Venezuela has access to the items considered to be part of a Venezuelan's "basic basket" food, transport, education, clothing, housing, etc unless they receive government subsidies in the form of bags of food from the CLAP. But not everyone has access to even these basics. You need to have a special identity card.

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To get this card, you have to answer government questions about your political affiliation, your family, the number of people living in your house and whether you're receiving any subsidies from the government. The card specifies which days you can buy specific necessities, as a way to manage demand for scarce items. The day depends on the number of the identity card.

For example, people with numbers ending in zero, three or five, can shop on Wednesdays and Fridays. This only applies to products sold by the government and shops. With imported products, as long as you have the money you can buy them. In July , there was a wave of looting in Cumana, all brought on by protests that began with demands for bags of food from CLAP and ended with three people shot dead, more than arrested and some 70 shops looted.

At the beginning of , people are just as hungry, although the conditions have changed. There is imported food in the shops, in fact, many shops decided to stop selling clothes and footwear and sell imported food instead.