Venezuela Becomes Latin America’s Poorest Country

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – The Andrés Bello Catholic University (UCAB) in Caracas released the report entitled “Poverty in its multiple dimensions”, an analysis within the framework of the 2019-2020 National Survey of Living Conditions (ENCOVI) in Venezuela.

The work stresses poverty assessments, the country’s poverty profile, international comparisons, social policies and programs, as well as proposals.

The survey notes that, between 2013 and 2019, there was a 70 percent decline in Venezuela’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP), that inflation between March 2019 and March this year was over 3000 percent, that the average daily income is US$0.72 and that 79.3 percent of Venezuelans cannot afford to buy food.

One of the report’s conclusions is that “the increase in poverty was due to the deterioration of income and the worsening of employment.” In addition, the report states that “improvements” in housing were “a side effect of international migration”.

Compared to other countries in the region, the study is categorical: “Venezuela is the poorest country and the second most unequal in Latin America.” In respect to the first indicator, measured in both incomes of less than US$1.9 and US$3.2 per day, Venezuela has overtaken Haiti, historically considered the poorest in the region, as well as Guatemala, Bolivia and Ecuador. In the case of inequality or distribution of wealth, as measured by the GINI index, Venezuela is only behind Brazil on this point.

“Poverty levels in Venezuela are comparable with the world’s poorest and most politically unstable countries,” says the survey, which compares the Caribbean nation with countries like Nigeria, Chad, Congo and Zimbabwe.

The survey also analyzed the Local Supply and Production Committees, better known as CLAP, which the Maduro regime uses as a tool for political propaganda and social control.

According to the report, “five per cent of the extremely poor do not benefit from the CLAP box”, while “22 per cent of the non-poor or not extremely poor do.” In addition, 39 percent of respondents said they receive at least one CLAP box per month, 15 percent every two months and 46 percent at no defined intervals.

In 2018, 88 per cent of households were covered by the program and received the box at some point; while in 2019 the proportion of beneficiary households rose to 92 per cent.

Professor Anitza Freitez, the project’s coordinator, stressed: “We wish to emphasize that this edition has meant the beginning of a new cycle for ENCOVI, where the information collected has been improved thanks to the incorporation of some variants related to the sampling size and its design, the use of electronic devices, as well as the extension of the topic list.”

She said that the ENCOVI’s findings are part of “the updating of the country’s demographic profile, after an unprecedented wave of emigration with an enormous impact on the reduction of the volume of the population and the level of aging, as well as on the structure of households.”

Freitez stressed that the survey’s findings show an “accumulated destruction in the last five years” of the population’s quality of life.

She concluded that the numbers show how “the welfare level of our population continues to deteriorate through indicators on the poverty situation in homes, setbacks in access to public services and their operation, as well as the decline in facilities or households.”