Venezuelan farms go waste due to diesel shortage
10 hours ago
Luc Cohen and Keren Torres, Reuters
Venezuelan farmer Agustin Zenere should have been planting corn by the second week of May a crucial task in the economically devastated South American country where 7 million people are food insecure.
Instead, his 30-hectare (74-acre) plot of land in the breadbasket town of Turen was still covered with the brown, shriveled leaves of a sesame crop he could not harvest in time because the government had not given him enough diesel to run his tractors.
Diesel shortages have grown acute in the once-prosperous OPEC nation since late last year, when the United States ended an exemption to its crippling sanctions on state oil company PDVSA aimed at ousting President Nicolas Maduro that had allowed it to swap crude oil in exchange for imported diesel. With farmers warning they may not have the fuel needed to plant staple corn and truckers sounding the alarm about diffic
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