Edison Arciniega, president of the Center for Agrifood Studies (CEA) -this Friday morning- before the National Assembly (AN) a letter addressed to Jorge Rodríguez, president of Parliament, backed by two technical reports that show the food inequality that prevails in Venezuela today. All of this in order to ensure that the Legislature addresses the situation and seeks to build concerted solutions with technical support to this phenomenon.
The documents that confirm the inequality in food access and the imbalances in the national diet, according to the sociologist, make it clear that Venezuela today is experiencing “the greatest phenomenon of inequality in terms of access to food.”
“In concrete terms, the richest 20% of the population, the 5,400,000 richest Venezuelans, are consuming close to 35% of food; while the poorest 20% are consuming close to 16%”, emphasized the agri-food expert.
When delving into this situation by specific items, the CEA spokesman warned that, in the case of meat, the richest 20% of the population is consuming close to 40% of the meat; while the poorest 20% are consuming around 3% of the meat available. He added that the same happens with tropical fruits, consumption of chickens and eggs.
“We are in a country where depending on what social class you belong to, the possibilities of eating are determined and with this the possibilities of development of the person. It is urgent that in Venezuela we develop a policy to address food inequality because food inequality determines the cognitive and health possibilities of Venezuelans”, he pointed out.
From the outskirts of the Federal Legislative Palace, the spokesman said he was confident that Parliament would open a debate where, on the one hand, the technical organizations that today collect this information on food phenomenology are consulted; and on the other hand, the entities of the National Executive are summoned with a voice of questioning to see what are the public policies that they are going to implement to face extreme food inequality.
“This phenomenon is serious, we are talking about the poorest people in Venezuela being condemned to undernourishment, cognitive deficiencies associated with nutrition, life expectancy problems associated with nutrition (…) Although there is a fiction of the average of the national improvement, the reality is that the national improvement is concentrating on the richest 40% and the poorest 60% of the population is hardly benefiting”, he emphasized.
Emergency measures
When consulted by the media, the expert pointed out as urgent measures that an urgent reform of the National Executive’s social food policy must be undertaken, in order to incorporate a greater protein component.
Likewise, he referred to the construction of a great economic consensus to be able to raise the purchasing power of the poorest, in addition to promoting a prospective scheme of wealth generation from the food system.
