Preface. Venezuela is experiencing a double whammy of drought and low oil prices, which has lead to blackouts and inability to import food, due to their oil production peaking in 1997.  If you want to know how collapse will unfold in the United States and elsewhere, read the posts from the categories and posts below. Mexico may be next as you can read here.

Related posts:

• North Korea collapse posts
• How different nations have coped with oil shortages
• Dmitry Orlov: How Russians survived the collapse of the Soviet Union
• A book review of “Russia’s Food Policies and Globalization”
• Lessons Learned from How Cuba Survived Peak Oil
• Venezuela collapse posts

Alice Friedemann  www.energyskeptic.com  Author of Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy; When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, & “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”.  Women in ecology  Podcasts: WGBH, Jore, Planet: Critical, Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, Kunstler 253 &278, Peak Prosperity,  Index of best energyskeptic posts

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Smith M (2023) Venezuela’s Dilapidated Oil Industry Is An Environmental Catastrophe. oilprice

Crude oil is fouling waterways, contributing to deforestation, poisoning farmland and killing wildlife at an ever-greater rate.

The collapse of Venezuela’s once prolific oil industry has triggered an economic and humanitarian crisis that accelerated in 2019 after U.S. President Donald Trump implemented strict sanctions cutting the Maduro regime off from international energy markets. It isn’t only Venezuela’s economy and people which have suffered from a foundering hydrocarbon sector and corroding energy infrastructure, tremendous damage has occurred to the environment. Oil spills, leaking pipelines and storage facilities, noxious discharges from ramshackle intermittently operating refineries and toxic tar like slicks are commonplace in Venezuela. The OPEC member’s collapsing petroleum industry, along with precious metals and other mining, is a key culprit of the significant environmental damage occurring in the near-failed state. This is particularly worrying when it is considered that Venezuela is ranked as the eleventh most biodiverse country globally. Two organizations which provide regular reports and updates regarding the substantial environmental degradation occurring because of the petrostate’s oil industry are the Venezuelan Observatory of Environmental Human Rights and the Venezuelan Observatory of Political Ecology.

The Maracaibo Basin contains 15% of Venezuela’s copious oil reserves, which at 304 billion barrels are the largest globally, and is responsible for around two-thirds of the OPEC member’s hydrocarbon production. As a result, the lake contains thousands of drilling platforms, miles of pipelines which in many cases are unmapped and scores of storage facilities as well as other industry infrastructure. Most facilities are more than half a century old and heavily corroded because of their age and an endemic lack of crucial maintenance. The OVDHA estimates up to 1,000 barrels of crude (Spanish) are being discharged into Lake Maracaibo every day due to ongoing low-level leaks from heavily corroded petroleum pipelines, storage tanks and other decaying infrastructure.

Kurmanaev A (2021) Terrorist group steps into Venezuela as lawlessness grows. New York Times.

With Venezuela in shambles, criminals and insurgents run large stretches of the nation’s territory. But some of them are stepping to take over the role the government used to play, and bring drinking water to residents in the arid scrublands, teach farming workshops and offer medical checkups. They mediate land disputes, fine cattle rustlers, settle divorces, investigate crimes and punish thieves.

Many residents — hungry, hunted by local drug gangs and long complaining of being abandoned by their government — have welcomed the Marxist guerrillas of Colombia, also known as the National LIberation Army (ELN) for the kind of protection and basic services the state is failing to provide.

By some estimates, guerrilla fighters from across the border now operate in more than half of Venezuela’s territory, according to the Colombian military, rights activists, security analysts and dozens of interviews in the affected Venezuelan states. Organized and well-armed, the ELN quickly displaced the local gangs that terrorized villages. The guerrillas imposed harsh penalties for robbery and cattle rustling, mediated land feuds, trucked in drinking water, offered basic medical supplies and investigated murders in a way the state never did, residents said.

It was hardly a charitable undertaking, though. In return for bringing stability, the ELN took over the smuggling and drug trafficking routes in the area, much as they have in parts of Colombia. They also began taxing shopkeepers and ranchers.

Colombian guerrillas have used the Venezuelan countryside as a haven for decades, and neglected Caracas shantytowns have long been home to organized crime. But rarely have criminal organizations exerted such territorial and economic control — and the government so little — as they do now. Venezuela is sleepwalking into fragmentation by armed groups.

Before the ELN took control, criminals fought brutally over the smuggling routes, terrorized neighborhoods, sprayed houses with bullets, and demolished villages. Most residents fled to Colombia, but are coming back now that it is safer.

Dallmeier F, Burelli CV (2021) The world must act to stop Venezuela’s environmental destruction. The Washington Post.

The dismantling of Venezuela’s environmental institutions and the collapse of its oil sector have generated a chain reaction of unsustainable natural resource extraction. Illegal land grabbing, deforestation and an out-of-control gold rush in protected rainforest areas have created a perfect storm combining environmental degradation with a humanitarian crisis. Massive sediment loads from mining are decimating reservoirs and hydropower generation capacity, while mercury from gold extraction pollutes rivers and sickens people.

2019. Venezuela’s Water System is Collapsing. New York Times.

In Venezuela, a crumbling economy and the collapse of even basic state infrastructure means water comes irregularly — and drinking it is an increasingly risky gamble. Scientists found that about a million residents were exposed to contaminated supplies. This puts them at risk of contracting waterborne viruses that could sicken them and threatens the lives of children and the most vulnerable.

The risks posed by poor water quality are particularly threatening for a population weakened by food and medication shortages. 

Electrical breakdowns and lack of maintenance have gradually stripped the city’s complex water system to a minimum. Water pumps, treatment plants, chlorine injection stations and entire reservoirs have been abandoned as the state ran out of money and skilled workers

Outside Caracas, the breakdown of the water infrastructure is even more profound, leaving millions without regular supplies and forcing communities to dig wells and rely on untreated rivers.

Kurmanaev, A., et al. 2019. A fuel shortage is crippling agriculture in Venezuela. New York Times.

The New York Times interviewed dozens of Venezuelan farmers. Nearly all have slashed their planting area this year and some are leaving their fields fallow – steps that are likely to deplete what is left of the food supply and lead even more Venezuelans to join the estimated four million who have already fled the country.

Farmers said they have tried to produce in spite of scarce inputs, price controls, crime, inflation and collapsing demand. But this year’s harvest is only half of 2018’s because of the gasoline shortage and other problems such as lack of seeds and fertilizer.

In Venezuela’s vast plains further east, sugar cane rots just yards from a refining mill and rice fields are left barren for the first time in 70 years because farmers don’t have fuel to transport their produce to distribution centers or seeds and fertilizers to plant new crops.

Venezuela’s main agricultural association, Fedeagro, estimates the area planted with the country’s main crops, corn and rice, will shrink by about 50% this year.

On a visit to Pueblo Llano last month, 150 cars waited outside the closed gas station for the sixth straight day. Many of the drivers slept in their cars to prevent robberies, braving the frigid weather at an altitude of 7,500 feet. During the day, they walked backed to their farmsteads, a trip that in some cases took hours. “While I’m sitting here in line, my produce is rotting in the fields,” said farmer Richard Rondón as he gave away summer squash as long as his arm from the back of his pickup truck to people passing by. “I got nothing to harvest with.”

The shortage has hamstrung the time-sensitive rice and corn harvest in the state of Portuguesa. In May, it prevented farmers from planting a new crop before the rainy season.

Pons, C. 2019. With Venezuela in collapse, towns slip into primitive isolation. Reuters.

At the once-busy beach resort of Patanemo, tourism has evaporated over the last two years as Venezuela’s economic crisis has deepened and deteriorating cellphone service left visitors too afraid of robbery to brave the isolated roads.   In some regions, travel requires negotiating roads barricaded by residents looking to steal from travelers.

These days, its Caribbean shoreline flanked by forested hills receives a different type of visitor: people who walk 10 minutes from a nearby town carrying rice, plantains or bananas in hopes of exchanging them for the fishermen’s latest catch.

With bank notes made useless by hyperinflation, and no easy access to the debit card terminals widely used to conduct transactions in urban areas, residents of Patanemo rely mainly on barter.  In visits to three villages across Venezuela, Reuters reporters saw residents exchanging fish, coffee beans and hand-picked fruit for essentials to make ends meet in an economy that shrank 48% during the first five years of President Nicolas Maduro’s government. 

Residents of the town of Guarico this year found a different way of paying bills – coffee beans for anything from haircuts to spare parts for agricultural machinery. The transactions are based on a reference price for how much coffee fetches on the local market, Linares said. In April, one kilo (2.2 pounds) of beans was worth the equivalent of $3.00. In El Tocuyo, another town in Lara state, three 100 kilo sacks of coffee buy 200 liters (53 gallons) of gasoline.

It is just one of a growing number of rural towns slipping into isolation as Venezuela’s economy implodes amid a long-running political crisis.

From the peaks of the Andes to Venezuela’s sweltering southern savannahs, the collapse of basic services including power, telephone and internet has left many towns struggling to survive.

Venezuela’s crisis has taken a heavy toll on rural areas, where the number of households in poverty reached 74% in 2017 compared with 34% in the capital of Caracas. Residents rarely travel to nearby cities, due to a lack of public transportation, growing fuel shortages and the prohibitive cost of consumer goods.

Lorente, M. 2019. Venezuela returns to ‘Middle Ages’ during power outages. Yahoo news. 

Walking for hours, making oil lamps, bearing water. For Venezuelans today, suffering under a new nationwide blackout that has lasted days, it’s like being thrown back to life centuries ago.

El Avila, a mountain that towers over Caracas, has become a place where families gather with buckets and jugs to fill up with water, wash dishes and scrub clothes. The taps in their homes are dry from lack of electricity to the city’s water pumps.  “We’re forced to get water from sources that obviously aren’t completely hygienic. But it’s enough for washing or doing the dishes,” said one resident, Manuel Almeida.

Because of the long lines of people, the activity can take hours of waiting.

Elsewhere, locals make use of cracked water pipes. But they still need to boil the water, or otherwise purify it.  “We’re going to bed without washing ourselves,” said one man, Pedro Jose, a 30-year-old living in a poorer neighborhood in the west of the capital.

Some shops seeing an opportunity have hiked the prices of bottles of water and bags of ice to between $3 and $5 — a fortune in a country where the monthly minimum salary is the equivalent of $5.50.

Better-off Venezuelans, those with access to US dollars, have rushed to fill hotels that have giant generators and working restaurants.

For others, preserving fresh food is a challenge. Finding it is even more difficult. The blackout has forced most shops to close.

“We share food” among family members and friends, explained Coral Munoz, 61, who counts herself lucky to have dollars.

For Kelvin Donaire, who lives in the poor Petare district, survival is complicated.  He walks for more than an hour to the bakery where he works in the upmarket Los Palos Grandes area. “At least I’m able to take a loaf back home,” Donaire said.

Many inhabitants have taken to salting meat to preserve it without working refrigerators.

Others, more desperate, scour trash cans for food scraps. They are hurt most by having to live in a country where basic food and medicine has become scarce and out of reach because of rocketing hyperinflation.

The latest blackout this week also knocked out communications.  According to NetBlocks, an organization monitoring telecoms networks, 85% of Venezuela has lost connection.

In stores, cash registers no longer work and electronic payment terminals are blanked out. That’s serious in Venezuela, where even bread is bought by card because of lack of cash.  Some clients, trusted ones, are able to leave written IOUs.

With Caracas’s subway shut down, getting around the city is a trail, with choices between walking for miles, lining up in the out-sized hope of getting on one of the rare and badly overcrowded and dilapidated buses or managing to get fuel for a vehicle.  Pedro Jose said bus tickets have nearly doubled in price. 

As night casts Caracas into darkness, families light their homes as best they can. “We make lamps that burn gasoline, or oil, or kerosene — any type of fuel,” explained Lizbeth Morin, 30.

“We’ve returned to the Middle Ages.”

December 17, 2018 Planet money podcast: Bonus indicator: the measure of a tragedy

It’s hard to understand how bad a country is doing with figures like inflation rate, unemployment rate, and their minimum wage. A better way to understand a nation’s living standards is how many calories a person could afford to buy a day earning a minimum wage if they spent all of their money on food — that is — the food with the most calories, which in Venezuela has sometimes been pasta or flour, and today is the yucca plant.

Venezuelans could by 57,000 calories in 2012 with one day’s wages, and several dozen eggs.

But today a person can afford just 900 calories or 2 eggs. It would take a Venezuelan 6 weeks to be able to afford one Big Mac earning minimum wage.

Since the average person needs 2,000 calories a day, as well as calories to feed their family, and also housing, clothing, medicine, and so on, it’s not surprising that the average Venezuelan lost 24 pounds last year, and that Venezuela probably has the highest murder rate in the world.

The result is that at least 10% of Venezuelans have emigrated, nearly 3 million people. If that many proportionally left the U.S. we’d have 30 million people fleeing to Canada and Mexico and elsewhere.

July 16, 2018. Keith Johnson. How Venezuela Struck it poor. foreignpolicy.com

…”Venezuela’s murder rate, meanwhile, now surpasses that of Honduras and El Salvador, which formerly had the world’s highest levels, according to the Venezuelan Violence Observatory. Blackouts are a near-daily occurrence, and many people live without running water. According to media reports, schoolchildren and oil workers have begun passing out from hunger, and sick Venezuelans have scoured veterinary offices for medicine. Malaria, measles, and diphtheria have returned with a vengeance, and the millions of Venezuelans fleeing the country — more than 4 million, according to the International Crisis Group — are spreading the diseases across the region, as well as straining resources and goodwill.”

…”Thanks to their geology, Venezuela’s oil fields have enormous decline rates, meaning the country needs to spend more heavily than other petrostates just to keep production steady. “

2017-10-22 Oil Quality Issues Could Bankrupt Venezuela.  The next few weeks for Venezuela will be crucial, as it struggles to meet a huge stack of debt payments. Reports that the nation’s oil production is experiencing deteriorating quality raises a new cause for concern for the crumbling South American nation.Reuters reported that its oil shipments are “soiled with high levels of water, salt or metals that can cause problems for refineries”, which has led to $200 million in cancellations of oil contracts, making Venezuela even less able to make debt payments, since oil is the only source of revenue barely keeping the nation afloat. Many experienced oil workers have fled the country to find food and escape violence.  Because of these problems, and Trump imposed sanctions, U.S. imports have dropped from roughly 700,000 barrels per day to 250,000 bpd.

2017-5-2 Venezuela Is Heading for a Soviet-Style Collapse. A few lessons from the last time an oil economy crashed catastrophically

2017-2-27 ASPO Peak Oil Review: A new survey shows that 75% of Venezuelans may have lost an average of 19 pounds in the last year as widespread food shortages continue. Nearly a third of the population are now eating two meals a day or less. The survey also shows that the average shopper spends 35 hours a month waiting in line to buy food and other necessities. A sense of hopelessness has engulfed the country, and most no longer have an incentive or the strength to protest against the government and its policies as was happening two years ago. Government roundups of opposition politicians continue. Venezuela is clearly well on its way to becoming a failed state.

2016-11-1 Venezuela is telling hungry city dwellers to grow their own food. Washington Post

2016-10-21 Planet Money Podcast #731: How Venezuela Imploded

2016-8-23 Venezuela’s latest response to food shortages: Ban lines outside bakeries

2016-05-04 Hungry Venezuelans Hunt Dogs, Cats, Pigeons as Food Runs Out. Economic Crisis and Food Shortages Lead to Looting and Hunting Stray Animals  

Sabrina Martín. April 27, 2016. Looting On the Rise As Venezuela Runs Out of Food, Electricity. PanAmPost.

Food Producers Alert They Have Only 15 Days Left of Inventory amid Rampant Inflation

“Despair and violence is taking over Venezuela. The economic crisis sweeping the nation means people have to withstand widespread shortages of staple products, medicine, and food.  So when the Maduro administration began rationing electricity this week, leaving entire cities in the dark for up to 4 hours every day, discontent gave way to social unrest.

On April 26, people took to the streets in three Venezuelan states, looting stores to find food.

Maracaibo, in the western state of Zulia, is the epicenter of thefts: on Tuesday alone, Venezuelans raided pharmacies, shopping malls, supermarkets, and even trucks with food in seven different areas of the city.

Although at least nine people were arrested, and 2,000 security officers were deployed in the state, Zulia’s Secretary of Government Giovanny Villalobos asked citizens not to leave their homes. “There are violent people out there that can harm you,” he warned.

In Caracas, the Venezuelan capital, citizens reported looting in at least three areas of the city. Twitter users reported that thefts occurred throughout the night in the industrial zone of La California, Campo Rico, and Buena Vista.  The same happened in Carabobo, a state in central Venezuela.

Supermarkets employees from Valencia told the PanAm Post that besides no longer receiving the same amount of food as before, they must deal with angry Venezuelans who come to the stores only to find out there’s little to buy.

Purchases in supermarkets are rationed through a fingerprint system that does not allow Venezuelans to acquire the same regulated food for two weeks.

Due to the country’s mangled economy, millions must stand in long lines for hours just to purchase basic products, which many resell  for extra income as the country’s minimum wage is far from enough to cover a family’s needs.

On Wednesday, the Venezuelan Chamber of Food (Cavidea) said in a statement that most companies only have 15 days worth of stocked food.

According to the union, the production of food will continue to dwindle because raw materials as well as local and foreign inputs are depleted.

In the statement, Cavidea reported that they are 300 days overdue on payments to suppliers and it’s been 200 days since the national  government last authorized the purchase of dollars under the foreign currency control system.

The latest Survey of Living Conditions (Encovi) showed that more than 3 million Venezuelans eat only twice a day or less. The rampart inflation and low wages make it increasingly more difficult for people to afford food.

“Fruits and vegetables have disappeared from shopping lists. What you buy is what fills your stomach more: 40 percent of the basic groceries is made up of corn flour, rice, pasta, and fat”.

But not even that incomplete diet Venezuelans can live on because those food products are hard to come by. Since their prices are controlled by the government, they are scarce and more people demand them.

The survey also notes the rise of diseases such as gastritis, with an increase of 25 percent in 2015, followed by poisoning (24.11 percent), parasites (17.86 percent), and bacteria (10.71 percent).

The results of this study are consistent with the testimony of Venezuelan women, who told the PanAm Post that because “everything is so expensive” that they prefer to eat twice a day and leave lunch for their children. That way they can make do with the little portions they can afford.”