Venezuela: 'The world's weakest economy?'
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 18 May 2020
⏱️ 17 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
A third of Venezuela's population is at risk of malnutrition, according to the UN and the latest gasoline crisis could weaken the country's economy further. Entire villages are said to have been cut off from food supplies because trucks can't get fuel to deliver to them. That’s the context a crisis which has made Venezuela the world’s weakest emerging economy, according to a recent review by the Economist magazine. Earlier this month the situation became even more volatile when two Americans were caught apparently trying to launch a coup attempt against the government. We hear from Adam Tooze, a professor of history at Columbia University and we get the views of Venezuelan opposition politician Manuela Bolivar. (Picture of a woman wearing a face mask walking next to graffiti reading Don't be a slave of the dollar in Caracas, photo by Federico Parra via Getty Images).
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello there, I'm Ed Butler and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC World Service. |
| 0:06.6 | Coming up, life on the streets in one of the world's most challenged emerging economies. |
| 0:12.7 | Venezuela has been suffering hyperinflation. |
| 0:15.7 | The economy no longer functions. |
| 0:17.6 | There are millions of Venezuelans living as refugees in neighbouring countries. |
| 0:22.1 | And so on top of that, to have this shock hitting the Venezuelan oil economy is devastating. |
| 0:27.9 | Yes, the struggle to get by in Venezuela and the fears now around how it's going to resolve itself. |
| 0:35.2 | We have a lot of armed groups facing problems because there is no enough money to maintain |
| 0:42.6 | all of them. |
| 0:43.7 | In that reasoning, I think maybe we are going to face more violence. |
| 0:49.2 | That's all to come in Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 1:04.0 | Dr. Rafael Barrio. Oh, yeah. in Business Daily from the BBC. A curious form of social interaction in Venezuela these days, old friends greeting each other |
| 1:10.5 | in the middle of the night |
| 1:11.4 | whilst waiting to fill their cars with gasoline. The country with the world's richest oil |
| 1:17.0 | reserves has now literally run out of gas. You can queue for the whole day and then they still |
| 1:23.8 | don't have any fuel. It causes a lot of frustration. We are living on top of a sea of |
| 1:28.9 | oil. That's Dr. Rafael Barias Armas. He's a cancer surgeon. I could never imagine that at 71 years old, |
| 1:41.9 | I was going to be spending the whole night queuing to get fuel. |
| 1:45.8 | It's bizarre. In the morning, we must operate on a patient who has rectal cancer, |
| 1:50.8 | so we need gasoline to get to the clinic. The cancer won't wait for this pandemic to pass. |
| 1:58.4 | The coronavirus crisis has affected Venezuela in the worst way possible. It's forcing businesses |
| 2:04.8 | to close, but it's also prompted the global oil price to crash. And Venezuela's oil-dominated |
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