Talk:Shortages in Venezuela

Title
The title of this article may be a little broad since shortages have occurred before in Venezuela. If anyone has suggestions or believe the title is fine, feel free to share your thoughts.-- ZiaLater  ( talk  ) 18:23, 3 December 2014 (UTC)


 * The title is too simple, the contents are as naïve as they could be. The title should be changed to reveal its true nature, thus: Shortages caused by Venezuela's "Socialism of the 21st century". The real list of goods and items experiencing not "shortages" or "depletion", but which have absolutely disappeared is immensely broader, because the "Bolivarian" government is not selling Dollars at all to the industry and commerce, forcing their closure and/or bankruptcy, or in the case of foreign enterprises, their exit from the country. That means most of the Pharmacy and chemical industries, the automobile makers, the fledgling Electronics industry, etc. Venezuela in 2015 is a country where no goods at all, from toothbrushes to auto parts to electric motors, from fertilizers to insecticides, from Penicillin to a simple crutch to a Cardiograph are to be found. Transportation means, the electrical sector, even the communications sector, the agriculture, livestock and food industries in general are either stagnant or under heavy recession. The supply chains have been purposely and effectively broken, the country is coming to a screeching halt. The reason: the ruling elite (nicknamed "Boliburgeses" or "Bolivarian bourgeoisie") have "other uses" for the scant Dollars available from the battered oil industry, which has been under incompetent management since 2002. --AVM (talk) 21:19, 24 February 2015 (UTC)

What about "*Current* Shortages in Venezuela"? Coreybchapman (talk) 19:39, 23 May 2018 (UTC)

List of affected items
The current list (as of the creation of the article) involves more recent shortages. There are also numbers next to the listed items corresponding to sources from the Spanish shortage article.-- ZiaLater  ( talk  ) 18:23, 3 December 2014 (UTC)

Restructure sentence
Hi all, this sentence is a bit confusing to understand. I am going to edit it to the best of my understanding, but please feel free to correct me if I misinterpret information. Shelbyhoward423 (talk) 13:00, 20 September 2017 (UTC)

External links modified
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I have just modified 13 external links on Shortages in Venezuela. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
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Needs incorporation of fiscal and trade data
The lack of broader fiscal, production and trade data in this article has led to some misrepresentations. Listed foremost under causes is "overspending and import reliance", casting import reliance as an effect of the Chavez government. First, Venezuela is not in a scenario of government overspend – state expenditure as a percentage of GDP is not too far off the 50-year average for the country and its maximum of 14.6% in the period places it towards the lower end internationally. Second, import reliance is not a defining aspect of the Chavez period but rather a reflection of the resource curse that all developing countries with large oil reserves experience. If you compare Venezuela with Saudi Arabia (very similar population and oil reserves) then you can see that oil is 90% of exports in both, and Venezuela's oil exports are actually a much lower percentage of GDP (25% vs Saudi's 50% in the medium term).

Venezuela's balance of trade over the last 20 years has reached historic surpluses, underlining the fact that excessive import reliance is not a facet of recent Venezuelan history, nor that expropriations were the root cause of falling oil output. Exports still vastly exceed imports. The biggest defining factor here was the sudden (and unexpected) decline in global oil prices at the start of 2015. Again Venezuela was not unique in this respect, as Saudi Arabia saw it's balance of trade collapse at the same time as Venezuela, as did Nigeria (whose oil makes up 83% of exports) - search for tradingeconomics.com balance of trade for the data. Venezuela's declining oil production overlaps in this period in the face of lower prices (several of its major fields are less profitably extractable at that price point) as well as the start of sanctions against the country cutting it out of important dollar markets needed to finance national non-bolivar-denominated debt.

There is also no historical context around Venezuela's agricultural production. Historic appropriations of land, a move to an oil-based export-oriented economy, and aggressive urbanization policies in the mid to late 20th century caused Venezuela to have very low agricultural productivity compared to its neighbours, with most land unproductive and concentrated in the hands of a few well connected people. A total of 70% of Venezuelan food was imported prior to the Chavez period. As a result of this history, the Chavez government created a policy of agricultural reform including expropriation as part of its peasants network. Investment in agriculture in the country increased 70-fold. Currently, the article points to government credit controls set in 2003 as the root cause of agricultural failure, but food production greatly increased in the period from 1998 to 2005, with issues only emerging later (as evidenced by anecdotal farmer reports here and here). It was the continued extension of agricultural reforms that marked the beginning of failure in the agricultural sector in the mid-2010s, as the government encouraged those without relevant expertise to move back to the the country, which stretched the previously successful financial and technical support initiatives to the point where the programme became counterproductive.

As it stands, the article is deeply unbalanced as it focuses exclusively on Venezuela's recent political history and socialist governments, and has very little coverage of either the international context and the economic history of the country which is integral to understanding why Venezuela is a country so susceptible to shortages. While those governments have overseen the crises, they are just the leaders of Venezuela now. The article should explain to the reader why countries with similar authoritarian leftist governments and economic problems to Venezuela – agriculture-oriented Nicaragua and rural Bolivia, for example – have not suffered the food shortages found in a nominally much richer country. SFB 03:20, 28 January 2019 (UTC)

A Commons file used on this page has been nominated for deletion
The following Wikimedia Commons file used on this page has been nominated for deletion: Participate in the deletion discussion at the. —Community Tech bot (talk) 22:52, 6 February 2019 (UTC)
 * Venezuelans eating garbage 2018 2.jpg

Five images of people eating garbage
Are all of those necessary? Anna Frodesiak (talk) 03:47, 7 February 2019 (UTC)

Orphaned references in Shortages in Venezuela
I check pages listed in Category:Pages with incorrect ref formatting to try to fix reference errors. One of the things I do is look for content for orphaned references in wikilinked articles. I have found content for some of Shortages in Venezuela's orphans, the problem is that I found more than one version. I can't determine which (if any) is correct for this article, so I am asking for a sentient editor to look it over and copy the correct ref content into this article.

Reference named "vz": From Time in Venezuela:  From UTC−04:00:  

I apologize if any of the above are effectively identical; I am just a simple computer program, so I can't determine whether minor differences are significant or not. AnomieBOT ⚡ 03:00, 24 October 2019 (UTC)

Section: Government explanations subsection: Food consumption
The premise and main claim of this subsection ("[head of the National Statistics Institute] Elias Eljuri, referring to a national survey, suggested that all shortages in the country were due to Venezuelans' eating") is not based on fact.

The actual interview and the only Spanish-language source of the three citations provided contain no trace of any such claim. Istead Eljuri's remarks are all concerned with asserting that Venezuelans are adequately nourished.

A Spanish report adds that "These statements were taken as a joke on social networks, due to the great shortage of personal hygiene products that are lived in the country, especially that of toilet paper with which the jocosidades were very imaginative."

And an Argentinian version gives the detail of the joke; in machine translation: "Laughter, on the other hand, was awakened by the government's reaction to the unusual import of personal hygiene products in response to the shortage. 'That's why we need toilet paper,' was a phrase repeated on Twitter by Venezuelans." This might seem to include a suggestion that the interview was the government's 'reaction' to its own importation of large quantities of toilet paper - but that is unclear and vague.

All of these sources agree that the content was about nutrition. Only the last of them of them asserts that the government made the bizarre argument attributed to it, and that is only in the headline (The Venezuelan government justified the shortage of toilet paper: "People are eating more") and not reflected in the text.

These last two sources, not cited in the WP page, make it clear that in fact that supposed argument was a joke made by unspecified Twitter users.

The 2nd & 3rd citations provided in the WP page introduce the idea that this was an argument put forward by the Venezuelan Government (actually the head of the National Institute of Statistics; current WP page has this as "the Venezuelan government's Instituto Nacional de Estadística (INE)", which obscures the discordant fact that the topic was statistics and the interviewee not a member of the government, still less speaking for it).

Again this claim appears in the headline and the lede - not in the body - of the 2nd citation (Toilet paper shortage is because ‘Venezuelans are eating more’ argues the government)

And the 3rd transmutes the story even further with the headline 'Venezuela’s grand plan to fix its toilet-paper shortage: $79 million and a warning to stop eating so much'. The article text makes no further mention of any 'warning', and one quick allusion to food consumption as reason for shortages is sourced via hyperlink to the Spanish elmundo.es article I cite above - the headline of which is the partial quote "In Venezuela there is no toilet paper because 'people eat more'" - revealed in the article to refer to the Twitter joke, but highly misleading since readers are likely to assume it refers to something more significant.

The very common problem of misleading headlines not supported by content, and that "many news organizations 'cannibalize' from each other without fact-checking and introduce new errors in the process" has been noted in a WP essay but not in any official guidance or policy.

The odd thing is that after the first line about this 'government explanation', the rest of the subsection goes off on a tangent - irrelevant to the topic of the section, but far more relevant to reality - of rebutting the claims actually made, about the adequacy of nutrition in Venezuela. I haven't delved into the edit history.

Finally, note that even if the news reports/headlines about the supposed government explanation of shortages were accurate, they wouldn't support the current text. They are all about toilet paper, while the WP text says 'all shortages'.

I only took the trouble to check this one paragraph because it combined glaring implausibility with a simple and relatively tractable subject matter. I have no intention of trying to amend or delete the subsection, as I expect it would involve arguments with intransigent and ideologically motivated editors.

Still, having bothered to check and having found that the subsection is basically completely wrong, I though I may as well record what I found out.

--Stax68 (talk) 11:21, 12 June 2020 (UTC)

Inflation graph
The graph quite clearly shows how the value dropped by a factor of 100 (two orders of magnitude) between the blue lines and is annotated as such. But the description below the graph mentions the gaps of a factor of 10 between the blue lines, gives applicable intervals and mean inflation rates, but that means that the info on the graph is different than the description, so if someone is better acquainted with these numbers than I am, it'd be great if someone corrects it. Galopujacyjez (talk) 08:36, 20 April 2021 (UTC)

When did the shortages start?
Sources say that shortages have mostly subsided since 2019, but there is not a definitive date as to when the shortages began. The article says 2010, but historical information on shortages occurring in the 1980s exists, though this continues to be removed. There are some mentions of shortages in the 2000s as well, though such shortages were not as notable as the scarcity that began following the election of Maduro. A clarification on this should be made. WMrapids (talk) 14:40, 24 January 2024 (UTC)
 * I think that the 2010 start year was originally placed by, using Chávez's declaration of an economic war as a reference. The article points out that the start of the shortages as they are known today started as early as 2008, though. I have added a source for this. However, I remember that there are infoboxes that can use different start dates, if this is debatable enough. --NoonIcarus (talk) 17:50, 24 January 2024 (UTC)