Red Meat Alert

By Adriaan van Ginkel

In other times, Venezuela was a good place to get yourself a good steak or a prime rib from a sizzling BBQ. Not anymore.  In fact, Venezuela, a country once filled with lots and lots of cows, pigs and cackling fowl, is nearing a general “No Meat” alert this coming Friday.

This morning we got alerted by the news on TV, and by an alarmed phone call from family in Caracas, that butcheries were closing down all over the capital one after the other. It had nothing to do with early Easter break, they were really closing down. The reason, in brief, is that there is no meat. Why? Because the meat offered by wholesalers and distributers to the butcheries is “too expensive”. Why is it too expensive? Because the government has bolted the meat prizes and put heavy fines on all those butchers who dare sell above those prizes. For example, the beef prize is put officially at 220 bolivars per kg. , but wholesalers sell the meat to the butchers at between 215 and 240 bolivars. That leaves a negative profit for the butcheries, so they simply refuse to sell meat, because if they sell it at the prize it should be (e.g. 240 plus 20% profit = 288 bolivars per kilogram), they will get fined and their merchandise will even get confiscated by the state authorities. If they sell it at the prescribed prize, they will go broke in no time. So, they prefer to close down till the government raises the legal prizes. You might call it a general butcher strike. No steak for a long time for many people. That will in turn lead to raised prizes for fish, sausages and veggies, whispers my conditioned predator brain to me. Let’s see, is there enough room in the freezer? How much money do we have? Get in the car, go, go, let’s buy stuff before it gets expensive or disappears!

Then you might say: get those wholesalers, they are cheating! Well, that is more or less what Maduro’s government wants you to think. Always blame the guy on the other side of the street. But the wholesalers have a different story to tell. They maintain that they get the beef, pork and chicken at an elevated prize from the breeders. So, you might scream in a revolutionary fervor, get those greedy land-owning, feudal ranchers! But they also have a story of their own to tell. The problem, as their organization FEDENAGA puts it, is that the costs of feeding and keeping the livestock healthy have risen to astronomical heights. The enriched food and the mandatory inoculations have all to be imported (as national produce is nowhere to be found), and for years the vast majority of independent cattle breeders – those who haven’t been expropriated till now - have unsuccessfully implored the Chavist government to provide them with cheap dollars to import, as the country’s own production of maize and other grains has been tumbling down a precipice for years.

So, since the government won’t give them the cheap dollars, as they simply deny there is a problem, the breeders import the cattle food and all other necessary things, like vaccinations and machinery, with own dollars changed illegally, which explains the often absurd differences between products of a same line on the market. And that explains why national products turn out to be so expensive. Since most basic goods have to be imported nowadays, turning them into ready-for-sale products takes a heavy toll on either your own pockets, if the government won’t give you dollars at a cheap price, or that of the state. It’s a classical lose-lose situation in which one side blames the other for the ship going down. But between high production costs, a labor law that only benefits the (lazy) employee, a state which does everything to block free national enterprise and a bolivar gone totally crazy, the biggest losers are us, the consumers on that sinking ship. The country, in short.

The government denies that domestic cattle food production has all but disappeared and blames the shortages on smuggling to Colombia, among other things - in other words, Venezuela’s state enterprises and ranches produce enough maize to feed farm animals great and small, but it never gets to the poor things. So, they just shove all complaints from the food producers aside and simply refuse to talk to either cattle raisers or butchers. The story of “we produce enough thanks to the Bolivarian Revolution” is however countered by data from the same government which tell a story of a country massively importing maize, meat and milk products from abroad. And remember, the only party that allows you to import, whether it’s cotton wads or condoms or milk or machines, is the Venezuelan state. And the only place where you can get legal dollars to import is the Venezuelan state. So, who is right? The facts tend to give the thumbs-up to FEDENAGA, who then states that, with the greatest regret, they have to offer their life stock at elevated prizes to the market to compensate for the expenses made to import the food with black dollars, and at least not risk going broke. And the circle closes. Expensive cattle turns into expensive meat and results in a clash with government regulations. Maduro’s government has, as of now, yet to react to this meat strike. 

The meat crisis of today has also had a dramatic effect on the actual situation on the farms. Since breeders won't sell their livestock at the price they have to (which as I explained, is lower than what it should be), wholesalers are stopping buying the animals, which has led to horrific situations on the hen and pig farms, where it is reported that animals are now killing and eating each other due to overcrowding. Pull your own conclusions out of this. 

Till very recently, the state’s answer to the agricultural problem has been to expropriate ranchers who wouldn’t believe the story of the imperialistic bear that ate the people’s honey. This has led to the proliferation of abandoned “socialist communal” ranches and a dramatic drop down the whole agricultural production line. Was Venezuela once a country that produced so much milk they had to dump the surplus into the Maracaibo Lake, now the milk you find, whether liquid or in powdered form, comes from abroad. Countless ranchers from Uruguay, Peru, Ecuador and Nicaragua now bless Venezuela and burn candles in front of the Virgin for the neat profits they make on exporting their milk, cheese, meat and even coffee to a country whose countryside resembles more and more the land it was before the Spaniards set foot on the continent. If the government has not filled these barren empty lands with cities of social

housing, like it happened with the sugar cane plantations in the state of Aragua, something I have repeatedly seen with my own eyes. In the picture on your left, this is what is left of the vast sugar cane fields of Aragua. Under the plastic, only barren earth gathers dust instead of bell peppers. In a short time from now, the make belief greenhouses will make way for social housing. While remembering that once, Venezuela exported the same products it now imports. So, whatever side is right, there is something very rotten in the kingdom of Hugo Chávez and his successor Nicolás Maduro… something the latter won’t deny.

And as for myself, there is a silver lining to those dark clouds. Since the prize of fish, long unobtainable because it was too expensive, is now lagging behind that of meat, we are eating yummy fresh tuna again at home, and even our pets join us in that omega-3 delight. This has resulted in me losing necessary weight and fitting again in those nice suits I couldn’t wear for so long. Till fish goes up, up and away, we will enjoy the brief lull in the Bolivarian Food Wars. 

Thanks for your reading. Please leave a comment behind. Have a great week and till next Wednesday!

© Adriaan van Ginkel 2015