WSJ.com Venezuela's food chain is breaking and millions go hungry. A report found 13% of children under five are stunted. Oil rich nation is on the edge of an irreversible catastrophe. Ananunia is a 62 year old retired municipal worker in the western Venezuela. Says her meals often consist of just a few corned flower pancakes known as a rapace. Even when she has money to buy groceries in the city of Monica Ibo's teaming flea market, she said that instead of quality food, they sell garbage like animal hides and rotten cheese. Now, a lot of these mainstream media stories begin with a kind of sensational if Sherry picking up a story. But to see this failure on the larger scale, there is an undeniable failure here. And early on in the care and a virus pandemic here in the United States, we brought you stories of hundreds of tons, thousands of tons of produce rotting on the side of the road because the supply chains were failing. Truckers weren't going out, stores weren't open. And here in the good ol' U.S. of A citizens of the empire, we will be protected from starving. Would there, they're just, they're not going to let that happen. We're going to have food lines, we're going to have food pantries overburdened, we're going to have tapping of stores and emergency supplies. But I don't think the powers that be would let a population as armed as ours starve. But in Venezuela, not only do we see the consequences of a different, vicious kind of socialism, but we see the fragility of it in a crisis like this. And while I will make the case until we admit it as a country that America is a fundamentally socialist nation as well, I'm certainly happy to admit that Venezuela's socialism is of a much more destructive scale in nature in the nationalization of industry. But widespread scarcity of gasoline is the latest bloke to the domestic food production of Venezuela, reminding goods from getting to market and farmers from filling up their tractors, food production in this oil rich nation, led by its socialist president Nicholas Maduro has already been hobbled by shortages of seeds and agrochemical price controls that made raising crops uncropable and government seizures of farms and food processing plants. So they were a few more a few more miles down the road to servo who weren't socialism than the United States when this crisis hit and were a lot more vulnerable. However, we can learn from this because we see how this serves to understand how in the United States we have been vulnerable to the shutdowns and lockdowns and all the ways that we have been pushed to certain breaking points. Venezuela's aren't the only ones going hungry across Latin America, the economic blow caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has thrown millions out of work and into poverty from Mexico City to Santiago. People are skipping meals lying up at soup kitchens and begging the United Nations agencies. They put conditions in Venezuela which even before the pandemic was suffering the worst economic meltdown in its history are by far the most dire. So skipping ahead, even when supermarket shelves were stocked, hyperinflation that hit 90, that's using me. It's a big number to say. 9,500 percent last year and I am employment mean that millions of Venezuelans families can't afford enough to eat. So yeah remember this was the country that was already in the middle of a currency crisis. And again I hate to make this like a mericentric role we're looking around the rest of the world and seeing like how worse people are suffering here than here but like let's learn from this. They're like what what led them to this currency crisis? Oh it's what the American federal government is doing now. And we've seen a lot more dollar collapse stories lately and I'm starting to see the substance and then that was lacking in in prior decades perhaps. So if it gets to that point in the United States, is the American federal government going to be able to bail out the Federal Reserve system with its muscle again? I don't know. The UN report said that the monthly minimum wage of just a few dollars by is less than 5 percent of required basic food stuffs for the average family. We've been as Carlos Alonzo 35 year old farm worker says that we've been saved by the avocados and bananas growing near our house. Now that is encouraging isn't it? I mean to end this story on a positive note as we see in the United States and learn more people and trying to live off grid to produce your own food. It's not that hard. Get that independence put in that effort and if this happens again, it's not going to happen. But there's one more quote I got to share here from the end of the story. I want to go one more paragraph. Others rely on remittances from relatives living abroad for these cash transfers have been cut in half amid COVID-19, quarantines and economic shutdowns. Said Susan Raffaile, Food Security Consultant and Venezuela. She said Mr. Maduro is reluctant to acknowledge the scope of the crisis or to allow the world food program or in other international A groups to distribute the massive quantities of food Venezuela needs. She said this is not yet a famine but we are in a food emergency. The food supply system has totally broken down. So please keep the people who are suffering in ways that in the United States is protected citizens of the empire we can't even imagine yet in your thoughts and your prayers and remember that we need to stay grateful for our good we have it if we can still afford to.