Going Hungry in Venezuela Our World

This is what a trip to the supermarket looks like in Venezuela.

A lot of people have come up to us to tell us how angry they are

because they have been here for over 12 hours and haven't been able to

get what they came to buy. This man warns us. They've seen you. And then

we are surrounded by soldiers. We are told to stop filming.

Welcome to my country, Venezuela. A country of food cues that the

government doesn't want us filming. A country in the grip of hunger,

where a shopping trip can end in a riot. A crippling economic and

political crisis means people living on top of the largest oil reserves

in the planets are struggling to find food. I am heading out to the

countryside, where I hear the situation is acute. We have barely

left Venezuela's capital when we're stopped.

There is a roadblock ahead. As soon as we get out of the car people have

started shouting and telling us that they're hungry, really. They told me

they have been protesting for three days, with no government answer.

Their banner is a position to the government for help. -- petition.

This is what they say they eat, mangoes that they get from the tree,

and that's all. The Venezuelan President Nicolas

Maduro faces an economic crisis unlike any Venezuela has seen

before. The socialist experiment his predecessor Hugo Chavez began 17

years ago is failing, triggering massive food shortages. They left us

on our way. I'm travelling across Venezuela to

the far west of the country. For me, personally, this will be a difficult

journey. Much of my close family still live in Venezuela and it's

painful to see hunger in my own country.

I visiting the country's second-largest city. I have heard

the food crisis is particularly bad. Away from the city, this is a poor

region of rural hamlets and fishing villages. For Venezuelans already on

the breadline, hunger is now a constant.

Everyone knows this woman here. For children, grandchildren and great

grandchildren make the upper part of this village. She is barely able to

feed them once a day, but there are people even worse off here. These

two girls are just asking her and her daughter if they can give them

some rice. We are telling them that there is no rice, they haven't got

any rice to give. She's going to walk off around the

community to show us what people are going through. -- walk us.

This man is blind and depends on government food aid.

Nearby, this woman said her baby with sugared water. She says she

can't produce breastmilk, she is too malnourished. -- said her baby. She

was eating three times a day when she took this picture one year ago.

Her other children play at cooking. There's a lot of fear here to talk

about what's going on, the hunger, the malnutrition. Medics don't want

to speak out in the open because they fear losing their jobs and the

authorities to let you go inside hospitals to film what is happening.

At one of the doctors has said enough is enough and now she wants

to talk to us. It is one thing to interview people

you've never met before, that tell you how they are facing hunger, but

another thing is to talk to your own family and find out the same things.

My father, I just met him and he has just lost so much weight. My dad

used to be a robust man and now you can see his cheekbones.

I am back in the capital, Caracas, to see if things are any better.

So, what people are telling us here is there's a lot of hunger. They

can't buy the food they need. There's a lot of anger in streets of

Caracas. There is some food on sale, but most

people can't afford to buy it. Venezuela has the highest inflation

in the world and it is hitting the poor the hardest. A worker on the

minimum wage would have to work for a year in half to buy one month's

food for the family. -- year and a half.

To help the poor, the government has put strict pre- inflation controls

on key essentials like flour and rice, but there's simply not enough

of that to go around. Even in middle-class areas like this, large

queues for food have become common. This is an example of how bad things

are right now to buy food. That is a supermarket and those queues of

people, who have been there since the early hours, they've been told

there is flour today. These cues literally go around all of the

building, go downstairs into the basement and then come up again

until they are finally able to get into the supermarket, hoping to get

flour. -- queues. One person told us he had been there until 3am until

4pm that day and was only able to get two packs of flour. How did it

get to this? Long before the current president of

power, Venezuela was the scene of a radical political experiment. These

are the slums, where millions of people live all across the country.

17 years ago one man promised to change this. His name was Hugo

Chavez and his picture is still everywhere in the slums. Politicians

had always ignored these neighbourhoods. During Hugo Chavez's

14 year rule, he saw profits from higher oil prices into housing and

food assistance. Chavez died of cancer three years ago. Before dying

he handed power to this man, current president Nicolas Maduro. I watched

him host of Venezuela's Independence Day parade.

Majuro in heritage child is's socialist experiment, but not behind

all the prices that financed his fund, public spending and brought

goodwill among his supporters. His popularity has plunged as many

Venezuelans blame their hunger on his mismanagement. The government

says it's not to blame and that it's the victim of an economic war waged

by speculators and even foreign powers intent on regime change in

Venezuela. This is where the Venezuelan

government shows its military strength with planes, tanks and

missile launchers. This is a country in crisis but here they're trying to

show that they are still strong. I met this guy might go among this

crowd at least he appears to enjoy enthusiastic support despite the

food shortages. These taxidrivers have travelled

from the far west of the country to show support for Maduro. But support

doesn't come completely free. The whole country is reeling from high

food prices and there are expecting the government to provide new taxis

to help them make a living. No mention of that today.

Those people we have just like to, they are the core of the Maduro

support, they are the supporters of the president but once we stopped

feeling, some of them came up to me to say they are struggling with the

crisis and they blame the President. -- filming.

So what is the government doing to alleviate people's hunger?

I've been given access to a distribution centre.

You have to register with the government to collect food here at

specific times, although supplies are not regular.

This is a government run programme to get cheap food at a fixed price.

You've got milk, flour, pasta, cooking oil, but. These are the

things that on the black market are sold at a much higher price, almost

25% or 30% of the monthly minimum wage.

As in any government programme in Venezuela, there's always Maduro

Andrade is overseeing everything. It all looks very calm and ordered

and today well-stocked. Well, this is a distribution centre at the

government has allowed us to film. At another distribution centre in

one of the city's largest slums it's a different scene.

People do not have access to this in an easy way. All the riot police we

have outside of this market is because people get restless,

impatient and riots happen quite often. We have to stay in the car

and not just to avoid arrest for filming. This neighbourhood is home

to pro-government gangs called Colectivos, or collectives. There

are armed groups that patrol this area and they don't allow the media

to film this because of the big queues, it begs the government, its

images and our contracts have identified different people who run

it. These are people who are armed, dangerous and they have attacked the

media before and that's why we need to stay in the car and look at it

from here. The Colectivos are concentrated in

the city's poorest and most crime ridden neighbourhoods. Access to

them is rare, but a member of one has agreed to meet us.

Alejandro grew up in this block of flats. He says collectives aren't

folks and they don't deserve their bad reputation. There a community

support network that also helps maintain law and order.

He says it devastates him to see people queueing for food in the

neighbourhoods below, but believes the government is doing all it can

and still believes in a political project he says changed the lives of

the poor. If there is support for mature

anywhere it's in these neighbourhoods. But even if the food

crisis and mismanagement is turning people against the government. --

Maduro. We pass a line of people waiting to buy from a government

food store. Alejandro takes us to meet some

people piloting what the government says is a long-term plan to solve

the food crisis. The government envisages small urban

farms sprouting in between the apartment blocks of Caracas to help

make Venezuela self-sufficient in food and even medicine.

Urban gardening. Will that feed a country of 30 million people?

It's unlikely to help people like this woman and her family, whose

children say they are hungry. Coming from here, having lived here

a lot of my life, as I come to the end of my time here in Venezuela,

the saddest thing I've seen in this country throughout this time is the

fact that people have lost the power of deciding when and what to eat. It

is such a simple idea, but it is so significant in anyone's life. When

you meet people at food queues or at roadblocks where they are protesting

to get food, the look in their eyes... There is despair.

President Maduro's official term lasts until 2019.

An opposition movement is pushing for a referendum to remove him from

office early. For now Venezuelans will have to

wait in line.