VENEZUELA: Gov’t Markets – a Low-Cost Option for the Poor

By Humberto Márquez Reprint | | Print |

Humberto Márquez

CARACAS, Aug 11 2003 (IPS) - Alicia Noguera has already bought low-cost rice, beans, corn flour, sugar, cooking oil, pasta, sardines and powdered milk, and is now waiting in line to purchase chicken from a refrigerator-truck parked next to a special government market.

Although weary from standing in long queues under a scorching sun outside the market near Caricuao, a large working-class neighbourhood on the southwest side of Caracas, the mother of three smiles contentedly.

”The prices here make it really worth the effort,” Noguera, whose husband is a mechanic, tells IPS. ”Some things cost half of what you could get them for at the supermarket, and for us, the poor, even the slightest difference in price is important.

”I also pick up flour, oil and beans for my sister’s family, who live nearby. There is a limit on what you can buy per person, but it’s enough to tide over both of our houses for a whole week,” she adds.

The Mercal – short for Mercado de Alimentos or food market – in Caricuao, one of the three biggest government markets in Caracas, is made up of a warehouse and a small shopfront, to which customers are admitted in groups of 10. The shelves empty quickly on the weekends.

The market is identified with a large red sign – the trademark colour of the followers of populist left-leaning President Hugo Chávez, a former paratrooper officer. A sergeant and two soldiers stand watch nearby, chatting next to an army jeep.

”I buy a little of everything, and the quality of what they sell is good,” Gloria de García, who works as a seamstress and domestic, comments to IPS, bag in hand. ”This is possible because a man like Chávez is governing. Although we already supported him before, we do so even more today.”

The Mercal programme was launched by the Chávez administration three months ago with the aim of providing low-cost food to the poor. The products are not subsidised, but are purchased or imported by state entities, without intermediaries.

A kg of corn flour, the basic ingredient for the ”arepa” or tortilla – the traditional ”bread” in this South American nation – costs 45 cents of a dollar, 17 cents less than in the supermarkets.

Whole chickens purchased from the Brazilian firm Avipla are sold at 1.12 dollars a kg, compared to packaged parts that are sold in supermarkets at three dollars a kg.

The soy oil which costs one dollar a litre, compared to two in the supermarkets, is also from Brazil. The rice comes from the Riceland cooperative in the southern U.S. state of Arkansas.

Black beans are sold for half of what they cost in other stores, and on the packages customers can read the constitutional article that tasks the government with guaranteeing food security.

The packages also carry the phrase ”Thousands of patriotic small shopkeepers said No to the Strike”- a reference to the December-January shutdown led by the leading business associations and trade unions in an attempt to topple Chávez.

Some re-sellers and microenterprises also take advantage of the Mercal programme, on a small-scale.

A man who calls himself Antonio tells IPS that he and two of his cousins visit the Mercal several times a week to buy ”up to five kgs of flour and several litres of oil for our small family business, making and selling empanadas (meat and vegetable patties or pies).”

Agriculture Minister Efrén Andrades told IPS in June that the government had earmarked 10 million dollars for setting up at least 40 Mercal branches.

But the head of the Mercal programme, army General Gerardo Lizcano, said in late July that some 400 tons a month of non- perishable food items are sold at each Mercal branch, and announced that in view of the initiative’s enormous success, the new goal was to open up 100 Mercal locales by the end of the year.

The programme also supplies small privately-owned food stands and shops that promise to sell the items to their habitual customers without marking up the prices set by Mercal.

”We will try to turn Mercal into a franchise operation run by the Venezuelan people,” said Andrades, alluding to the international fast-food chains that are run by local franchise- holders.

Another government programme is focused on promoting agreements between flour mills and producers of the meat and vegetables that usually accompany the popular arepa or tortilla, in order to increase consumption and improve diets.

In Venezuela, ”18 percent of the population (4.3 million of a total population of 24 million) is suffering from hunger, with an average deficit of 200 calories a day per person,” Cuban expert Elisa Panadés, representative of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) in Caracas, said in an interview with IPS.

That is similar to the percentage of the population suffering extreme poverty, which means they have incomes that are insufficient for providing a basic diet, according to official statistics.

Government figures also indicate that 26 percent of the population in this oil-exporting country is living in ”relative poverty,” with incomes that do not cover the cost of the basic basket of goods and services.

The private polling firm Datanálisis, which is openly aligned with the broad anti-Chávez opposition movement, reported that ”food consumption shrank 20 percent in the first few months of the year, and the buying power of the population shrank by one- third in the past year and a half, due to high unemployment,” which stands at around 22 percent.

But the war of mutual accusations between the government and the business associations, which blamed each other for the food shortages, has quieted down as the shelves of shops and businesses around the country are gradually filling up again after months of scarcity of basic items like flour, beans and chicken.

Andrades maintains that ”The scarcity was fictitious, created by the opposition as a kind of slow-simmering conspiracy.”

But Simón Nobile, spokesman for the country’s flour mills, says ”The government was to blame, because it froze foreign currency trading (strict exchange controls have been in place since January), when foreign exchange is needed to import inputs and raw materials.”