Tag Archives: Food Crisis

Venezuela arrests brownie and croissant bakers in ‘bread war’

A saleswoman sells bread at a bakery in Caracas, Venezuela March 17, 2017. REUTERS/Marco Bello

CARACAS (Reuters) – Venezuela this week arrested four bakers making illegal brownies and other pastries as President Nicolas Maduro’s socialist government threatens to take over bakeries in Caracas as part of a new “bread war”.

Maduro has sent inspectors and soldiers into more than 700 bakeries around the capital this week to enforce a rule that 90 percent of wheat must be destined to loaves rather than more expensive pastries and cakes.

It was the latest move by the government to combat shortages and long lines for basic products that have characterized Venezuela’s economic crisis over the last three years.

The ruling Socialist Party says pro-opposition businessmen are sabotaging the OPEC nation’s economy by hoarding products and hiking prices. Critics say the government is to blame for persisting with failed polices of price and currency controls.

Breadmakers blame the government for a national shortage of wheat, saying 80 percent of establishments have none left in stock.

During this week’s inspections, two men were arrested as their bakery was using too much wheat in sweet bread, ham-filled croissants and other products, the state Superintendency of Fair Prices said in a statement sent to media on Thursday.

Another two were detained for making brownies with out-of-date wheat, the statement added, saying at least one bakery had been temporarily taken over by authorities for 90 days.

“Those behind the ‘bread war’ are going to pay, and don’t let them say later it is political persecution,” Maduro had warned at the start of the week.

The group representing bakers, Fevipan, has asked for a meeting with Maduro, saying most establishments cannot anyway make ends meet without selling higher-priced products.

(Writing by Andrew Cawthorne; Editing by Randy Fabi)

Venezuelan girl’s diphtheria death highlights country’s health crisis

a mother who lost her child in Venezuela due to disease and health crisis

By Alexandra Ulmer and Maria Ramirez

PARIAGUAN, Venezuela (Reuters) – Eliannys Vivas, 9, started to get a sore throat on a Friday last month in this languid Venezuelan town where papaya trees shade poor cinder-block homes.

Five days later, Eliannys was dead, likely a victim of diphtheria, a serious bacterial infection that is fatal in 5 to 10 percent of cases and particularly lethal for children.

Her death and a wider Venezuelan outbreak of diphtheria, once a major global cause of child death but increasingly rare due to immunizations, shows how vulnerable the country is to health risks amid a major economic crisis that has sparked shortages of basic medicines and vaccines.

Eliannys’ story is also one of misdiagnoses and missed signals worsened by government secrecy around the disease. Her family had never heard of diphtheria and local doctors did not immediately suspect it, despite the infection having affected hundreds of people just a few hours away in Bolivar.

After Eliannys was taken to a local hospital, doctors, thinking the disease was asthma, used a sort of inhaler on her.

But the usually chatty girl – “a little parrot,” in the words of her day-laborer father — kept weakening, so doctors transferred her to a larger government hospital once an ambulance became available hours later.

At El Tigre hospital, all the devices to examine throats had broken three years ago, so no one checked her properly, according to a nursing assistant.

“They said it was asthma, asthma, asthma,” said her mother, Jennifer Vivas. But as Eliannys struggled to speak, she was rushed to a third and then a fourth hospital in neighboring Bolivar state.

There, doctors discovered with horror Eliannys suffered from grossly inflamed throat membranes – the classic symptom of diphtheria.

But even the fourth hospital lacked adequate treatment for the infection, so she received only a half dose of antitoxins and no penicillin at all, according to a medical professional who treated her there.

As Eliannys’ airwaves blocked up, she suffered two successive heart failures and died on Jan. 18.

“If the diphtheria diagnosis had been made earlier and she had gotten antitoxins, she would have had a chance of surviving,” the source who treated her said, asking to remain anonymous because the government has banned health professionals from speaking to the media.

DIPHTHERIA RETURNS

Venezuela controlled diphtheria in the 1990s, but it reappeared in the vast jungle state of Bolivar in mid-2016.

At least two dozen children died last year, doctors say, and cases are now thought to have spread to a half-dozen other states.

Shortages of basic drugs and vaccines, emigration of underpaid doctors, and crumbling infrastructure have made it easier for diseases to spread, medical associations said.

Many poor and middle-class Venezuelans also have weakened immune systems because they are no longer able to eat three meals a day or bathe regularly due to product scarcity, reduced water supply and raging inflation.

Government secrecy has compounded the problem.

“The fact people don’t know (about diphtheria) helps the bacteria spread,” said Caracas-based epidemiologist Julio Castro, who has been tracking the diphtheria outbreak and who showed photos sent to him of patients with thick white membranes coating their throat.

The unpopular leftist government of President Nicolas Maduro said in October there were no proven cases of diphtheria and admonished those seeking to spread “panic.”

It has since informed the World Health Organization of 20 confirmed diphtheria cases and five deaths, and emphasized there is a major vaccination drive under way, but has yet to provide a full national picture of the disease’s effects amid a generalized clampdown on data.

The Information and Health Ministries, as well as the Venezuelan Social Security Institute, which is in charge of some drug distribution and hospitals, did not respond to multiple requests for comment about Eliannys’ case and diphtheria more generally.

The only other country in the region with a significant number of confirmed diphtheria cases last year was Haiti with 33, the WHO said in December.

MORE ILLNESS AHEAD?

Doctors think diphtheria first spread from the rough-and-tumble illegal gold mines in Bolivar state, which is attracting poor Venezuelans as the minimum monthly wage languishes around $30.

After Eliannys’ family was forced to start skipping dinner in December, her father, Tulio Medina, decided to work in Bolivar’s yucca and yams plantation where he made more money but might have brought the infection home.

The disease has already spread to capital Caracas, where doctors say a 32-year-old mother died last year, and could yet affect more states.

With the Venezuelan pharmaceutical association estimating that roughly 85 percent of drugs are unavailable at any given time and in light of the short supply of vaccines, doctors are bracing for further increases in illnesses like malaria, pneumonia and tuberculosis.

Venezuela’s rate of immunization with the pentavalent vaccine, which protects children from five major infections including diphtheria, had slipped to 78 percent between January and November 2016, according to Health Ministry figures leaked to former Health Minister José Felix Oletta and seen by Reuters.

“At this rate, we’re going to see more illnesses, more deaths, more doctors leaving the country,” said pediatrician Hugo Lezama, the head of Bolivar’s doctors association, who himself earns only a handful of dollars a month.

“Those of us who stay are going hysterical trying to perform miracles so our patients don’t die.”

(Writing by Alexandra Ulmer; Editing by Christian Plumb and Matthew Lewis)

Dwindling hopes for Ecuador, death toll over 400

Ecuador's President Correa embraces a resident after the earthquake in the town of Canoa

y Julia Symmes Cobb and Ana Isabel Martinez

PEDERNALES/CANOA, Ecuador (Reuters) – Earthquake-stricken Ecuador faced the grim reality of recovering more bodies than survivors as rescue efforts went into a third day on Tuesday and the death toll climbed over 400 in the poor South American country.

Praying for miracles, distraught family members beseeched rescue teams to find missing loved ones as they dug through debris of flattened homes, hotels, and stores in the hardest-hit Pacific coastal region.

Meanwhile, a moved President Rafael Correa, visiting the disaster zone, said the quake had inflicted between $2 billion and $3 billion of damage on the OPEC nation’s already-fragile economy.

The damage from the quake could knock between two and three percentage points off gross domestic product growth, he told reporters. “Let’s not deceive ourselves, it’s going to be a long struggle … Reconstruction for years, billions (of dollars) in investment.”

In Pedernales, a devastated rustic beach town, crowds gathered behind yellow tape to watch firemen and police sift through rubble overnight. The town’s soccer stadium was serving as a makeshift relief center and a morgue.

“Find my brother! Please!” shouted Manuel, 17, throwing his arms up to the sky in front of a small corner store where his younger brother had been working when the quake struck.

When an onlooker said recovering a body would at least give him the comfort of burying his sibling, he yelled: “Don’t say that!”

But for Manuel and hundreds of other anxious Ecuadoreans with relatives missing, time was running out.

As of Tuesday, rescue efforts would become more of a search for corpses, Interior Minister Jose Serrano told Reuters.

The death toll stood at 413, but was expected to rise.

The quake has injured at least 2,600 people, damaged over 1,500 buildings, and left 18,000 people spending the night in shelters, according to the government.

In many isolated villages or towns struck by the quake, survivors struggled without water, power, or transport. Rescue operations continued, but the sickly, sweet stench of death told them what they were most likely to find.

“There are bodies crushed in the wreckage and from the smell it’s obvious they are dead,” said Army Captain Marco Borja in the small tourist village of Canoa.

“Today we brought out between seven and eight bodies.”

Nearly 400 rescue workers flew in from various Latin American neighbors, along with 83 specialists from Switzerland and Spain, to boost rescue efforts. The United States said it would dispatch a team of disaster experts while Cuba was sending a team of doctors.

To finance the costs of the emergency, some $600 million in credit from multilateral lenders was immediately activated, the government said.

Ecuador also announced late Monday it had signed off on a credit line for $2 billion from the China Development Bank to finance public investment. China has been the largest financier of Ecuador since 2009 and the credit had been under negotiation before the quake.

(Repoprting by Julia Symmes Cobb in Pedernales and Ana Isabel Martinez in Canoa; Additional reporting by Alexandra Valencia and Diego Ore in Quito; Writing by Alexandra Ulmer and Andrew Cawthorne; Editing by Jeffrey Benkoe)

FAO launches new appeal for Ethiopia, warns millions at risk of going hungry

A potent El Nino has decimated the agriculture sector in Ethiopia and left more than 10 million of the country’s residents at risk of going hungry, a United Nations agency warned Monday.

The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) launched an urgent appeal for $13 million to help roughly 600,000 of the Ethiopian farmers who have been hit the hardest by the devastating crop and livestock losses brought on by one of the country’s worst droughts in history.

According to the FAO, the number of Ethiopians in need of humanitarian aid has tripled since January 2015, and about 10.2 million of them are currently food insecure. UNICEF warned last month that additional 6 million Ethiopians could need food assistance by the end of the year.

The FAO said the $13 million is needed by the end of the month to help ensure that farmers will be able to produce food during Ethiopia’s main growing season, when up to 85 percent of the nation’s total food supply is generated. Planting for an earlier rainy season was already delayed.

“We’re expecting that needs will be particularly high during the next few weeks,” Amadou Allahoury Diallo, the FAO’s country representative in Ethiopia, said in a statement. “So it’s critical that we’re able to respond quickly and robustly to reboot agriculture now before the drought further decimates the food security and livelihoods of millions.”

Ethiopia is one of several African nations that has been affected by an abnormally strong El Nino, a weather pattern known for producing extreme weather throughout the globe.

In a video released by the FAO on Monday, the organization’s Response Team Leader Rosanne Marchesich said some parts of Ethiopia have seen crop and livestock losses of 50 to 90 percent.

The eastern part of the country has witnessed “complete destruction,” she said.

In a news release, the FAO added “hundreds of thousands of livestock” in Ethiopia have died from a lack of water, feed shortages or poor grazing resources, and that die-off has fueled declines in milk and meat availability. Some farming families were forced to sell their final agricultural assets after last year’s losses, and others have been eaten planting seeds as food.

The organization said malnutrition is a growing concern.

The FAO added the $13 million will be used to supply feed and clean water to herding households, as well as safe water and seed support to farmers planning to grow crops.

Yemen’s food crisis deepens as banks cut credit for shipments

LONDON/ABU DHABI (Reuters) – Banks have cut credit lines for traders shipping food to war-torn Yemen, where ports have been battlegrounds and the financial system is grinding to a halt, choking vital supplies to an impoverished country that could face famine.

Lenders are increasingly unwilling to offer letters of credit – which guarantee that a buyer’s payment to a seller will be received on time – for cargoes to a country plagued by a civil war between the government and Houthi militia as well as an al Qaeda insurgency, say banking and trading sources.

“Western international banks no longer feel comfortable processing payments and are not willing to take the risk,” said an international commodities trading source active in Yemen.

“What this means is traders are saddled with even more risks and have to effectively guarantee entire cargoes, usually millions of dollars, before the prospect of getting paid,” said the source, who declined to be named, citing security concerns. “There are just more and more obstacles now to bringing goods into Yemen.”

Traders that procure food for Yemen are mostly smaller, private firms based locally or regionally that buy the goods from international markets. Reuters spoke to several sources who declined to be identified, also citing security concerns.

The situation has worsened rapidly in the past month after Yemen’s central bank stopped providing favorable exchange rates for local traders buying rice and sugar from global markets, say the sources, further hindering trading of food, which accounts for a large proportion of the country’s imports.

The decision to limit such rates to wheat and medicine – deemed more nationally crucial – was a bid to preserve fast-dwindling foreign currency reserves.

The financing difficulties have been one of the factors behind falling shipments to Yemen, according to the sources. In January, around 77 ships berthed at ports in Yemen, according to U.N. data, down from around 100 ships in March last year – when the civil war escalated – and a far cry from the hundreds of ships that called every month in previous years.

The consequences could be grave for the Arab peninsula’s poorest country, which the United Nations says is “on the brink of catastrophe”. It relies on seaborne imports for almost all its food and 21 million out of 26 million people are in need of humanitarian support, with over half the population suffering from malnutrition.

The war has seen a Saudi-led Arab coalition intervene in late March a year ago to seek to restore the internationally recognized government of President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, battling the Iranian-allied Houthis and forces loyal to former President Ali Abdullah Saleh.

Mohammed AlShamery, an official at Yemen’s sole sugar refinery, in the northern city of Hodaida on the Red Sea, said the credit and currency curbs had added to the problems of bringing cargoes into the country.

The process had already been complicated by deteriorating security as well as inspections of vessels by Arab coalition warships hunting for weapons bound for Houthi fighters.

“You have to be in constant touch with the shippers and reassure them that everything is fine and sometimes send pictures of the area so they know it’s safe,” AlShamery said.

PRICES RISE

A European banking source said some banks had decided to completely withdraw from offering credit lines on food trades to Yemen. “Even if a bank is willing to process a payment, which relates to food, they have to be careful,” the source added.

Trading sources said banks that had been involved in Yemen’s food trade have included Commerzbank, Deutsche Bank and HSBC as well as regional Middle East banks.

Commerzbank and Deutsche Bank declined to comment. HSBC said it continued to support customers trading across the Middle East and North Africa region including Yemen “subject to relevant regulatory and commercial controls”.

Yemeni banks are also feeling the pressure. Aidros Mohammed, an official with state-run National Bank of Yemen, said since the end of last year it had stopped opening letters of credit for the trade of goods in general “as outside banks have stopped dealing with us”.

Watheq Ali Hamed, the manager of a store in Sanaa, said the decision by the central bank regarding rice and sugar purchases would be felt by ordinary Yemenis.

“Prices are already going up because of the war and the rise in the cost of securing the goods,” he said. “The full effects of that decision will be felt going forward. Luckily, we still have some stocks.”

Slowing of imports and rising prices could pose grave problems for Yemen, where areas are at risk of famine.

The country lacks sufficient seasonal rains, has limited access to farming areas and facing rising costs of agricultural supplies, a report by a U.N. food agency said in January.

PORT FLASHPOINTS

More than 6,000 people have been killed – about half of them civilians – in the war, which has seen the Houthis gain control of the capital Sanaa.

Major ports have been flashpoints for fighting including the southern gateway of Aden, which has been gripped by violence since Hadi supporters seized it from Houthi forces in July. There have also been Saudi-led air strikes close to the port of Hodaida.

Adding to the turmoil, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) has been expanding its presence in Yemen; in February it took control of the southern town of Ahwar, months after seizing the major port city of Mukalla to the east.

Two banking sources in Yemen said restrictions on moving money abroad due to the conflict was adding to trade financing difficulties. “We have a big problem in transferring money abroad … so we cannot open letters of credit for traders to import,” one Yemeni banker said.

Trading and banking sources also said uncertainty over who was in control of Yemen’s central bank – given its headquarters in Sanaa – was adding to lenders’ caution. One Middle East banking source said some institutions were steering clear of transactions while Sanaa was still under Houthi control.

The central bank could not be reached for comment.

A Feb. 11 report by Yemen’s Ministry of Planning and International Cooperation showed total foreign reserves of Yemen’s central bank had slid to $2.1 billion by the end of 2015, from $4.7 billion at the same point in 2014.

The report said a “deterioration of the national currency value and scarcity of foreign exchange” were making it difficult to finance imports.

“In light of the ongoing conflict, the private sector has undergone painful shocks,” Minister of Planning and International Cooperation Mohammed Al-Maitami wrote.

“Hundreds of thousands of workers have lost their jobs and source of income.”

(Additional reporting by Tom Arnold in Dubai, Stephanie Nebehay and Tom Miles in Geneva, Michael Hogan in Hamburg, Michelle Nichols in New York and Arno Schuetze in Frankfurt; Editing by Pravin Char)