Venezuela: Maduro Regime Introduces Rabbit Farming to Fight Mass Starvation

TO GO WITH AFP STORY BY GABRIEL BOUROVITCH - This picture taken on November 16, 2015 shows
DAMIEN MEYER/AFP/Getty Images

Venezuela’s socialist dictator Nicolás Maduro has announced his intention to introduce rabbit farming across many of the country’s major cities to fight starvation.

“Trump’s aggression against the people of Venezuela is a great opportunity to revise and change cultural patterns of consumption because they have forced us to eat their own products,” Venezuela’s Minister of Urban Agriculture Freddy Bernal said in response to sanctions imposed by Donald Trump last month.

“We have been taught that the rabbit is a very nice pet, but the rabbit from the point of view of war, a female rabbit gives birth to approximately 10, 12 little rabbits … In two months or so we have a two-and-a-half kilo rabbit,” he continued.

Bernal has since called on Maduro to launch a campaign seeking to change people’s attitudes towards rabbits, where instead of seeing them as pets, they consider them as “two and a half kilos of consumable meat.”

Maduro later endorsed the plan, pointing out that “rabbits breed like rabbits” and adding that his officials “are looking for creative solutions within our socialist, productive vision.”

In order to make Venezuela more productive, Maduro also announced a “special plan of agricultural production” where 200,000 young people go to the countryside to farm as part of state-controlled food production.

“I want a special plan of agricultural production so that at least 200,000 young people go to the countryside to produce food,” he said. “I will guarantee them everything, including a place to live and production training.”

The initiative comes despite the government previously denying that there was a hunger crisis in Venezuela. Following the Maduro regimes creation of a fraudulent lawmaking body known as the “national constituent assembly,” the body’s leader Delcy Rodríguez asserted: “There is no hunger in Venezuela. There is only will. There is no humanitarian crisis in Venezuela … only love.”

In reality, there are now mass chronic shortages of food across Venezuela, especially for products such as red meat, dairy, and fresh vegetables, which are now too expensive for many people to buy. Many Venezuelans have turned to extreme methods to sustain themselves, including scavenging the streets for food waste, as well as the butchering of dogs and zoo animals.

Amid skyrocketing inflation, the Venezuelan monthly minimum wage has crashed to under $5 a month, meaning people can no longer afford basic resources such as food, medicine, and sanitary products.

In February 2017, the Venezuela’s Living Conditions Survey found that 75 percent of Venezuelans had lost about 8.5kg (19 lbs) in 2016, 82.8 percent of Venezuelans were living in poverty, 93 percent cannot afford food, and approximately one million Venezuelan school children do not attend school “due to hunger and a lack of public services.”

Follow Ben Kew on Facebook, Twitter at @ben_kew, or email him at bkew@breitbart.com.

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