50 US dollars add up to almost 10 minimum wages in Venezuela, according to the BCV rate of March 7 (24.15 Bs/$). Buying delicatessen, vegetables, fruit and “salty” spends most of a family’s budget. In this fifth work of the series that presents SuchWhich weekly to tell you what expenses you can cover with a bill with the face of Ulysses S. Grant, the $50, purchases are addressed in one of the main municipal markets of Caracas
A Venezuelan family of five needs 486.87 dollars a month to cover the basic food basket. Says the Documentation and Analysis Center for Workers (cenda) But one thing is what the indicators reflect and another is the reality of Venezuelans, who they have to solve the week buying from $1 of cheese in the markets with more affordable prices.
Making a market that yields for a month is a práctic almost extinct. Now it is bought every seven days or even daily, depending on what goes into your pocket.
onion for a dollar; a kilo ‘and strawberry a dollar; take your mesh ‘e tomato; chili, one dollar…one dollar. Those are the offers that most people take advantage of when passing through the aisles of the Quinta Crespo Municipal Marketin Caracas, which is one of the most popular in the capital and serves not only residents of the west and the center, but also residents of other eastern municipalities, such as Chacao and Sucre.
The team of SuchWhich made a tour of their stalls to see What can you buy with $50 in the Quinta Crespo Market? part of the series that this web portal offers weekly, in order to see ClaroyRaspao what is “the capacity of El Grant in Caracas”.
In this case, products that are not inside the CLAP (Local Supply and Production Committees) food bags or boxes are included, on which they depend. 5 out of 10 Venezuelan familiesaccording to a report from the platform Hmm Venezuelawhich brings together 90 local NGOs.
The prices presented below were consulted on March 7. The official exchange rate for the dollar that day, that is, the Central Bank indicator, was 24.15 bolivars per dollar.
Let’s start by drawing up the account for a family group of five people (mom, dad, grandmother, a girl and a boy). If a c is armedvegetable ombo of a kilo of onion ($1.44), one of tomato ($0.82), half a kilo of paprika ($1.65), another of potatoes ($1.24) and one of chili ($1.65), are spent $6.8.
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To this account is added the money spent on meat and poultry. One kilo of ground beef ($6.00), three whole chickens ($7.50 per kilo), one of chicken thighs (2.25) and two of liver ($3.58). With this they would be $19.33.
But that total goes up if you add charcuterie: a kilo of hard cheese ($5) and two cartons of eggs ($10). This part alone is $15.00.
The remaining dollars can be spent on fruits in this way: 2 kilos of banana ($2.48), three of guava (3.10) and two of mangoes ($2.48). This for a total of $49.19, including vegetables, proteins and fruits.
Fruit stall inside the Quinta Crespo municipal market
These are the prices for protein, vegetable and fruit sales inside the market, but outside, in places like El Páramo and others nearby, they offer very good prices for meat and deli combos that go up to 10 dollars. One of them, for example, offers half a kilo of ground cheese, half a kilo of white cheese and one of sausage. This is a “deal” that could cost around $7 and is an easy way to “kill the day” when there’s not much money but mouths to feed.
«There (in the meat shop El Páramo) you can bring a bag more or less with 20 dollars (of animal protein). A kilo of thigh, steak, chop. And even a dollar of cheese you buy there and they give you a good portion. I do. Here with five dollars you can take all kinds of fruit in this stall. You buy guava, melon, milky, pin, banana. It lasts up to four or five days for me, because there are only a few of us,” said Juana Freitas, who is a fruit and vegetable vendor at Quinta Crespo and is also a customer.
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According to testimonies collected by SuchWhich, what they are selling the most right now is mortadella and chicken. The same business owners have decided to launch promotions with quarter kilos of certain cuts of meat and types of cheese to help themselves and the buyers themselves.
“Sometimes I’m asking and you hear that they ask for 100 grams of hard cheese or they come and ask for an onion, a tomato or a detailed egg,” said Iliana Betancourt, a frequent client of the Quinta Crespo market. 55% However, from 10% to 14% the proportion of family groups that spent more than half of their budget on food purchases increased, and from 17.5% to 23%, those who no longer had a budget to make these expenses .
Meat and charcuterie combos at Mayorista Gran Moisés, just outside the Quinta Crespo market
Here we present several prices that he consulted SuchWhich in the Quinta Crespo market and two purchase combinations of $50, for a couple and for a family.
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