Watch People Realize Exactly How Dire Venezuela's Food Crisis Is

“I knew things were bad down there but I didn’t know it was this bad.”

When Buzzfeed’s Pero Like channel sat down a few folks to try the “Venezuelan diet,” none of them seemed prepared to receive a huge helping of reality.

Venezuela was once an oil giant with a booming economy but a severe economic recession has pushed the country into a full-blown humanitarian crisis. Crime has skyrocketed in Venezuela while food and medicine have become dangerously sparse.

For those unaware of exactly how bad the food crisis is in the South American country, Pero Like’s video on the subject presents a striking visual. Pero Like gave each participant in the video a bag of food similar to what is available to some Venezuelans.

As they open the bags and examine its contents they begin to learn several sobering facts about the country’s food shortages. For example, Venezuelans wait in line for hours to buy very little food at a very high cost.

But the government also has food distribution committees, called “CLAPs” (Local Committees of Supply and Production), that deliver bags of food like those in the video to households. Those who receive food in this way don’t fare much better since bag contents are arbitrary and can cost hundreds of dollars depending on what it contains.

“There’s like no veggies or anything,” another man said about the bag’s contents.

According to Pero Like, bags reportedly cost up to $550 USD depending on its contents.
According to Pero Like, bags reportedly cost up to $550 USD depending on its contents.
Pero Like

Each bag has to feed a household regardless if a family has one or five kids. And what’s worse is that not everyone receives these subsidized bags of food, the committees are known to show favoritism to families loyal to the country’s socialist government.

“If you were one person you could maybe live on this for a week, but you’d be very hungry,” one man observed after examining the bag.

The point of the video is to bring awareness to just how dire the food crisis in Venezuela actually is, and it seems to have worked.

“I knew things were bad down there but I didn’t know it was this bad,” one participant said at the end of the video.

Learn more about Venezuela’s food crisis in the video above.

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