Maduro: Mission Accomplished!

[MRubio]

2. The price of any dishwasher or soap powder exceeds the minimum wage..........

.....By happenstance, we just got back from Punta de Mata on a buying trip. My woman, who is a retired school administrator, used her pension card to buy dish washing detergent. Her pension is paid twice monthly, 30,000 bs S total per month. She came back to the car laughing (no use crying) saying, "see this, it cost me almost half my pension". She held up a 200 gram plastic container of Las Llaves that cost her 12,000 bs S.



The problem here Ghost Dog is that we produce very little, and what little is produced, is usually done so with imported raw materials. This means that everything is paid for in dollars at the going rate on the street because the government has greatly restricted who can and cannot buy their dollars at preferred rates. Those costs get passed on to the customer, of course.

The capacity is there to produce most everything we need, what we lack is the production of raw materials. An example:

On the way home today, we stopped at the farm of a buddy of mine to buy whey for my hogs and cheese for my woman to sell in her bodega. The fellow's name is Pedro Briceño. In addition to producing milk/cheese, Pedro has 4 structures for the production of chickens, meat birds I call them, most would call them broilers. Each shed can handle 30,000 birds. The birds are ready for market in 37-40 days. After selling a complete lot, the shed is cleaned, sanitized, and prepared for the next batch. Toss in another 2 weeks or so, and on average he could produce 120,000 live birds, 2.2 kilos each, every 60 days.

His sheds were empty. Why you might ask when there are people everywhere looking for SOMETHING to eat? The answer is simple. No chicks. No feed. No medicines......at any price.

Carlos Natera, in front of Pedro's place. He ranches cattle, produces milk and cheese as well. Also has 2 sheds, 60,000 bird capacity in total every 60 days. Empty.

Enrique Lama, a Peruvian whose place is just south of Pedro's. TWENTY TWO sheds, each with a capacity of 50,000 birds! All empty, same story.

Same story for Pedro's 2 neighbors to the north. I ran the calcs a while back and estimated that in only a 5 kilometer area around Pedro's place, there's capacity to produce at least 1,000,000 beautiful, live chickens, 2.2 kilos each, every 60 days but all that capacity, for the most part, now sits empty.

These guys want dearly to produce. They just can't.