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   From: burfordTjustice@tues.uk   
      
   ‎Another success for Socialism...all skinny people..   
   except for those running the country..they lost no weight.   
      
      
   Venezuelans lost 19 lbs. on average over past year due to lack of food   
      
      
   In a new sign that Venezuela’s financial crisis is morphing dangerously into   
   a humanitarian one, a new nationwide survey shows that in the past year nearly   
   75 percent of the population lost an average of 19 pounds for lack of food.   
      
   The extreme poor said they dropped even more weight than that.   
      
   The 2016 Living Conditions Survey (Encovi, for its name in Spanish), conducted   
   among 6,500 families, also found that as many as 32.5 percent eat only once or   
   twice a day — the figure was 11.3 just a year ago.   
      
   In all, 82 percent of the nation's households live in poverty, the study found.   
      
   Venezuelans suffer shortages of the most basic goods, from food to medicine,   
   amid triple-digit inflation and a nearly 80 percent currency collapse in the   
   last year.   
      
   A whopping 93.3 percent told Encovi researchers that their income was not   
   enough to cover their food needs, which would explain why Venezuelans are   
   replacing red and white meat with vegetables and tubers, mainly potato, and   
   other cheaper options.   
      
   "There is a change in eating habits patterns from 2014 [when Encovi surveys   
   began]. Previously Venezuelans consumed primarily rice, breads and pastas; now   
   it’s tubers,” said Maritza Landaeta, a researcher with the Venezuelan   
   Health Observatory, as    
   quoted by runrun.es.   
      
   “In our qualitative studies we observed mothers who say that they fed their   
   children only with bananas or auyamas [a kind of pumpkin] to satisfy their   
   feeding needs,” she said.   
      
   Additionally, 65 percent of those surveyed admitted having children at home   
   who had skipped school for food-related reasons — including filling in for   
   their parents in the long food lines.   
      
   Venezuela’s food crisis has gotten so bad that remains of everything from   
   dogs and cats to donkeys and even giant anteaters have been found in garbage   
   bags at city dumps around the country.   
      
   “Sometimes we only find the animal’s heads, guts and legs. We used to see   
   this very little in the past, but this practice is now out of control and on   
   the rise,” Robert Linares, a Maracaibo waste disposal worker, told the Miami   
   Herald. Linares    
   added he recently found on the street the remains of a dog that had been   
   skinned and dismembered.   
      
   The once-wealthy oil producing nation has fallen on hard times since Nicolás   
   Maduro took power following the death of socialist leader Hugo Chávez in   
   2013. A drop in global oil prices has crippled the country’s economy and   
   Venezuela has been plagued    
   with the worst inflation rate in the world, close to 700 percent last year,   
   according to International Monetary Fund.   
      
   The lack of food has even earned a nickname: “The Maduro Diet.”   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)