Los efectos en el sector agroalimentario venezolano de la pandemia de la COVID-19 y las medidas adoptadas para combatirla

In March 2020, the World Health Organization declared as pandemic the infection caused by the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, while Venezuela declared total quarantine and social distancing 2 days after the first case was detected, being one of the countries that reacted more quickly to face it. However, several sources report failures and shortages of supplies in the country's public hospitals, as well as an increasing trend in the number of reported cases and deaths. This article aims to discuss the main effects of COVID-19 in the Venezuelan agri-food sector and those derived from the measures adopted to fight it. It is a documentary-descriptive and analytical research, based on primary and secondary sources of information. The main findings reveal that, similar to what happened at the world level in terms of drops in the world GDP, employment rates, and tax collection of the States, COVID-19 aggravated the structural problems already suffered by the Venezuelan food system-SAV. In the general economy, the production of goods and services was reduced, with consequent effects on formal and informal employment, particularly during the first months of quarantine and social distancing adopted. Such measures also had a negative impact on the agricultural sector, partly because of the delay in implementing measures to prevent its paralysis. The shortage of fuel supply continues to be the main problem in the sector, affecting the planting and harvesting of the vegetable agricultural subsector, livestock and fishing activities, as well as transportation. The external dependence of the SAV has also been exacerbated by the progressive decline in income derived from oil exports, which had already been recorded prior to the pandemic. All this has led to a deterioration of food supply and population food purchasing power, in a country that already had a growing food and nutritional insecurity before the pandemic. The persistence in implementing anachronistic and demonstrably ineffective economic and agro-food policies (price controls on goods and services, particularly public goods and services and on the exchange rate, generalized subsidies, expropriations, issuance of money without backing, among others) has exacerbated the delicate situation of the domestic productive apparatus, meanwhile, the socioeconomic situation of Venezuelan households still deteriorating quickly. Both at the rural and urban levels, citizens manifest a marked deterioration of public services (potable water, electricity, and domestic gas, mainly), together with insecurity, lack of income, and reactivation of emigration as the most serious problems to face. Therefore, only a true shift towards stabilization and structural adjustments (of the Venezuelan economy, in general, and of the agri-food sector, in particular), well planned and orderly implemented, would allow the recovery -in the medium and long term- of the levels of national production and food consumption that would allow the country's population to reach adequate levels of food and nutritional security.