This article, Got Milk? Venezuela Often Doesn’t, caught my attention this morning. It’s all about ongoing milk shortages in Venezuela, shortages so extreme that often people just can’t get milk at all. The shelves are literally bare. And it’s not just milk. There are similar problems with eggs, sugar, flour, and other staples. What is going on?
Venezuela is categorized by the World Bank as an Upper Middle Income country. It’s GDP per capita is about the same as Argentina’s and a little higher than Mexico’s. It’s not super rich, but it’s definitely not third world. And yet, in recent years, milk has become increasingly difficult to find. Supermarkets sell out early in the day. Some days there may be none at all. It’s certainly a far cry from the situation that used to exist in Venezuela.
“People should get as much milk as they wish to buy. That is how it used to be in Venezuela,” Gonzalez, the purchasing manager at Kromi Market, a grocery store, told Al Jazeera. “Now, people just get what they can find.”
So what happened? Why this shortage of milk? I mean, it’s a pretty basic food, really. And there’s plenty of land for agriculture. There’s been no great drought or epidemic of dairy cow disease or anything like that. Why is milk so hard to get?
It turns out that the government of Venezuela agrees with me that milk is pretty important. They’ve also decided that, because it is such a basic food, everyone needed access to it. So they’ve started regulating the industry heavily. Among other measures, they’ve set a maximum price that dairy farmers can charge. But producers say the price doesn’t even cover their costs. They simply can’t afford to produce enough milk to meet demand. Same with other staples.
This shouldn’t be a surprise, and it’s something we should consider when we want the government to get involved in ensuring that we all have access to anything – be it food, or housing, or healthcare. When Chavez decided that all of Venezuela needed cheaper milk, the shelves emptied. When the US government decided more of us needed to own homes, we got the housing crisis and the opposite of the result we were hoping for. If it follows the same pattern, and there’s no reason to think it won’t, healthcare will have similar problems.
It’s not that the government’s intentions are bad, but they just can’t manage complex economic systems. They inevitably fail, even with something as simple as milk.
