Nair Granado rushed to buy groceries as soon as she got her $60 paycheck.

She knew it would not be enough to fill the pantry in her home on the eastern fringes of Caracas, Venezuela’s capital. Still, she worried that, before long, her earnings would not be enough to cover even the basics.

“Prices are rising every day,” said Granado, 33, a lab receptionist living in a sprawling working-class neighbourhood with her two children. “It’s completely out of control.”

After more than a decade in crisis, Venezuela is no stranger to food shortages, high prices and economic pain.

But the US military raid that removed Venezuela’s leader, Nicolás Maduro, has plunged the South American nation into a chaotic new chapter of political and economic uncertainty, setting off a new wave of inflation and currency woes pushing basic grocery items out of the reach of many Venezuelans.

Granado, on a recent weekday, could still afford to buy flour and half a carton of eggs. But she did not even dream of buying meat — at more than $9 per pound, the price had nearly doubled in only a few days.

“You really have to find ways to be frugal, to make your salary stretch,” Granado said. “It’s getting harder to buy things.”

The economic turmoil is now threatening to deepen a yearslong humanitarian crisis in Venezuela, where more than 70 per cent of people already live in poverty, according to a survey by a group of leading universities in the country.

The new affordability crisis is hitting Venezuelans especially hard because many have already been living on the edge of hunger for years, said Phil Gunson, a senior analyst with the International Crisis Group, a research organisation, who has lived in Venezuela for over two decades.

“They’ve sold everything they could, they’ve tightened their belts until there are no more holes left,” Gunson said. “So there’s nothing left to fall back on.”

At the core of the sharp rise in food costs is Venezuela’s dependence on the US dollar, widely used in everyday transactions because it is typically less volatile than the country’s own currency, the bolívar. When Venezuela’s economy, once Latin America’s richest, spiralled deeper into crisis in 2019, driven by government mismanagement and exacerbated by US sanctions, many people began to save, spend and charge in US dollars.

As a result, even though the country’s economy is not formally “dollarised”, Venezuelans today rely on US dollars for their daily spending. Vendors often buy from suppliers in dollars, so they peg prices to the currency. And they typically charge higher prices if buyers want to pay in Venezuelan bolívars.

New US sanctions over the past year have also forced Venezuela to sell less oil on the global market, which has reduced the volume of dollars circulating in its economy and made the currency more valuable. Now, anxiety about Venezuela’s economic future has sent the value of the dollar soaring, effectively doubling local prices of staples like meat, cheese and milk.

The Central Bank of Venezuela sets an official exchange rate, but most people rely on an unofficial rate called the “parallel dollar”, which reflects what dollars actually sell for on the street. This past week, the unofficial value of the dollar peaked at twice the official rate. It has since stabilised, but remains well above the official rate — and grocery store prices have not fallen in step.

Johana Paredes, 30, said she was used to rationing the month’s groceries for her family of four. But the new sharp increase in food prices has made it difficult to buy even essential items that were, until recently, within reach.

“This past week, we couldn’t do any grocery shopping,” Paredes said, showing the scant supplies in her tin-roofed home in Los Teques, an hour outside Caracas. “That’s why there aren’t even potatoes,” she added. “Before, we were rich and we didn’t even know it.”

In Caracas’s most iconic municipal market, vendors shouted prices in dollars and inflated them in bolívars. Leaning on the counter of the butcher shop where he works, Jesús Balza, 50, said customers were buying less.

“People are only spending on necessities,” he said. “Whoever used to buy a kilo of cheese is now buying half.”

New York Times News Service