Inhabitants of Barrio Unión in Petare, Caracas, open CLAP food boxes delivered by the productive organization Colectivo Resistencia y Rebelión de Caracas, April 4, 2019. Photo: Eva Marie Uzcátegui/Getty Images.
The vice president of Venezuela, Delcy Rodríguez, reported that in 2024, the Local Supply and Production Councils (CLAPs) distributed 132 million food boxes, with items containing 140,000 tons of protein, throughout Venezuela.
At a government-sponsored food fair in the working-class neighborhood of San Agustin in Caracas, on Friday, January 3, Vice President Rodríguez stressed that the Venezuelan government continues working with the private sector to ensure the production and distribution of food in the country for the most vulnerable sectors.
CLAPs is a program launched in April 2019 by President Nicolás Maduro to provide food to Venezuelan families at low prices, in a measure to counter the US sanctions and economic warfare. The program consists in directly delivering food boxes every month to Venezuelan households, in coordination with communal councils. In 2019, the US government launched a battery of unilateral coercive measures against Venezuelan and international providers for this key social and economic program.
The CLAPs were born at the cruelest moment of the economic warfare, when the entire business sector was orchestrated to make people suffer the maximum, calculating that in this way there would be a social uprising and the long-awaited “regime change.” The CLAP model has been exceptionally successful and saved thousands of people from starvation, in addition to creating or regenerating a non-existent or stunted social fabric in communities, a dividend as important as the first one, seen in strategic terms.
Vice President Rodríguez stated that today the food that is consumed in Venezuela “comes from the hands of the Venezuelan people, from industrialists, from farmers, from fishers.”
President Maduro: Venezuela Produces 95% of Products Distributed in CLAP Program
“Thanks to a strategy put into effect by President Nicolás Maduro, today we have full sovereignty in the production of cooking oil in the country,” she continued. “We no longer have to import this product, for example. We have to produce Venezuelan cooking oil and concentrate on consuming Venezuelan cooking oil.”
She also called on the people to promote national production and, in this way, confront the enemies of the country who are trying to undermine Venezuela’s economy and industrial capacity.
“We continue to work for the recovery of Venezuela’s industrial capacities. Nobody will stop us, we will continue to recover sectors such as hydrocarbons and agroindustry,” she added.
(Últimas Noticias) by Gustavo Rangel, with Orinoco Tribune content
Translation: Orinoco Tribune
OT/JRE/SC
