Venezuelans battling soaring food prices

Soaring food prices are forcing many Venezuelans to change their eating habits, trim their shopping lists and set aside more of their earnings to feed their families.

The oil-exporting country is coping with one of the highest inflation rates in the world: 22.9 per cent as of last month, and food prices are rising even faster.

"It's gotten 100 per cent worse," said Evelyn Villamizar, a 29-year-old student who is raising a five-year-old son in a poor barrio of the Venezuelan capital, Caracas. She said she feels "strangled by the prices."

"If you have enough for one thing, you don't have enough for another," said Villamizar, who was picking up her son at a public school that provides a free daily snack.

Venezuelans have long coped with high prices, but in the past two years the impact has been felt more strongly because inflation has been outpacing salary increases, said Ricardo Villasmil, a professor at Caracas' IESA business school.

poor hard hit

The poor have been particularly hard-hit. Villasmil said that official figures show the poorest one-fourth of Venezuelans now spend 45 per cent of their income on food.

High prices and sporadic shortages of some foods have weighed on President Hugo Chavez's popularity, though he has held on to the support of about half of Venezuelans, said Luis Vicente Leon, director of the Venezuelan polling firm Datanalisis.

The Chavez administration has tried unsuccessfully to tame racing inflation with price controls on many food items, neighbourhood meal programmes and massive imports of products that are sold through cut-rate state-run markets.

He also has regularly raised the minimum wage, though government figures show that the average Venezuelan's buying power has shrunk 14.5 per cent in the past four years.

Last year, the median salary grew 22 per cent, lagging behind 27 per cent inflation.

Venezuela's skyrocketing prices are an anomaly in Latin America.

The country's food prices shot up 33.7 per cent during the 12 months ending in March, far above the average increase of 7.7 per cent for the region as a whole, The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization said.

While Chavez often blames speculators for the price rises, many economists say his government's lavish spending is partly to blame.

Angel Garcia Banchs, an economics professor at Venezuela's Central University, said the money supply has expanded faster than production of the goods it can buy.

- AP