Some 450,000 Venezuelan children receive baskets from the World Food Program (WFP), which complement the family diet in a country where food is increasingly expensive, said the national director of this United Nations agency on Thursday, April 27.
Some 450,000 Venezuelan children receive baskets from the World Food Program (WFP), which complement the family diet in a country where food is increasingly expensive, said the national director of this agency on Thursday, April 27. United Nations.
The WFP has been operating in Venezuela since July 2021 in 2,000 schools in eight regions of this Caribbean country of 30 million inhabitants, where they give children these bags of dry food that complement other state feeding programs.
Of the total of 450,000 children, whose basket also benefits their families, some 16,000 also receive hot meals in schools with “greater nutritional diversity”, a pilot project that the WFP wants to extend to the entire population they serve, explained Laura Melo, program director.
“The main problem is a matter of economic access to food,” Melo said in a meeting with two international news agencies.
“We have seen in Venezuela, as in the rest of the world, a significant increase in food prices, and this means that vulnerable populations have difficulty acquiring food with nutritional diversity,” he added.
Venezuela is going through a deep crisis, with an economy that shrank 80% between 2014 and 2021, although there are timid signs of recovery. The easing of strict exchange controls and the liberation and dollarization of prices alleviated the shortage that, for years, caused kilometric queues to purchase basic foods such as flour, coffee or sugar.
“What you see today is not a matter of not having food on the market, there is food, but the prices are too high,” insisted Melo.
Three out of four Venezuelans do not have enough income to cover the food basket, estimated an academic study presented last November.
The food basket was located in March at 511 dollars, according to the Center for Documentation and Analysis (Cendas), a reference due to the lack of official figures.
The Venezuelan government sells bags of food at subsidized prices through the CLAP program, aimed at vulnerable populations, but marred by corruption scandals.
The WFP, which in 2023 manages a budget of about 120 million dollars, aspires to benefit one million children. And next year it hopes to cover most of this population with its hot meal program, which in this first stage also raised school enrollment by 30%.
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