Venezuela toilet paper shortage sends ordinary lives around the bend

Venezuelans buy toilet rolls
Venezuelans queue in Caracas to buy toilet rolls. Last week the government announced that it was organising an emergency shipment to boost supplies. Photograph: Jorge Silva/Reuters

When Mercedes Aquino, a 48-year-old nurse working in an affluent neighbourhood of Caracas, heard from a patient that a corner shop had received a shipment of toilet paper, she dropped everything and ran to the store.

She also did what most people here do every time butter, milk, sugar, oil or cornflour make a rare appearance on supermarket shelves – she spread the word.

"By the time I got there, the line outside was a block long. By the time I left it had doubled," Aquino said, as a guard outside the upscale shop stamped her hand with the mark used to prevent people returning to buy more than the two packages allotted.

For the past four months Venezuelans have had to struggle to find basic food staples. Toilet paper is the latest item to join the list of unobtainable goods – last week the government announced it was organising an emergency shipment to boost supplies – but it has heightened the sense of urgency and indignation felt by many.

"What am I supposed to substitute [toilet paper] with? It's hard to live without it," Aquino said. Like many people here, she will try to stock up. "I phoned my son and told him to come, but not everyone can walk out of their job and cross the city to stand in line for hours," she added.

It's not the first wave of shortages to hit the oil-rich nation in the last decade. There were shortages in 2003 after the then president, Hugo Chávez, imposed currency controls to prevent capital flowing rapidly out of Venezuela amid widespread distrust in the private sector following a series of land expropriations and corporate nationalisations. In 2007 milk all but disappeared from supermarket shelves.

This time, however, shortages have been coupled with power cuts, making daily life a growing challenge that many predict will only get worse.

"Food shortages appear like the problem, but they are really just a symptom of the graver ill," said Angel Alayon, an economist and editor of the news magazine ProDavinci. "This is the cumulative effect of a decade of economic controls – both currency and price controls that drove the productive sector to the ground."

President Nicolás Maduro, who was elected last month by a 1.5% margin in a still-disputed poll, has blamed food shortages and power cuts on his political enemies, saying they are part of broader sabotage aimed at creating discontent.

Maduro has accused businesses of hoarding products to force the government to lift price controls designed to make goods affordable for the poor. The corporate sector insists scarcity is the result of ill-managed state-run companies producing at less than half their capacity.

Last week Maduro signed deals with Argentina, Brazil and China designed to boost agricultural collaboration. The minister of commerce, Alejandro Fleming, announced that a shipment of 50m toilet rolls was on its way. But in a country of 25 million people the move was more gesture than long-term solution.

For Alayon, scarcity obeys simple market rules. After almost two years of regulated pricing in a country with mounting inflation, no company can afford to produce at a loss, and even a turn to more market-friendly policies will take a while to jump-start the economy.

Ordinary citizens cope with the shortages with strategies that include anything from substituting molasses for sugar, skipping milk in their coffee – or simply learning to ration how much paper they use.

"I'll have to use four squares instead of wrapping my hand as if in a cast", says Herman Roo, a 42-year-old engineer in Caracas – which in comparison to the rest of the country has been relatively free from shortages.

For those living in the countryside, food scarcity has been compounded by crumbling roads and daily power cuts.

For Rosa Arawatamay in Puerto Piritu, a small coastal town in eastern Venezuela, rationing, substituting or even forfeiting certain foods is not as wearing as knowing she will have to spend a whole day hunting down a grocery list she hardly ever completes: "I have to take a bus from town to town in hope I will find everything. What used to take an hour now takes a day."

But Arawatamay counts herself lucky. Her neighbour, she said, makes a living from selling homemade ice-cream and cakes. When sugar, butter and flour go missing it is not simply dessert at stake, but her livelihood. "And if power is cut, her food often spoils," said Arawatamay.

Venezuelans have also resorted to bribery and a parallel market where they pay up to four times as much as the market price.

For many, these street-savvy tricks only add to a generalised sense of mounting indignation.

"I've paid cashiers at supermarkets so they text me whenever they know milk is coming. I'm embarrassed at the extent I've gone to, but when it comes to my kids' milk, I do what I can," said Ana Ferreras, a 44-year-old lawyer.

In Maracaibo, Venezuela's second largest city and once home to a booming oil industry, the local government has asked people to curb their consumption of electricity or risk a fine. Additionally, what were once programmed power cutoffs now occur arbitrarily.

"I don't mind turning off the [air conditioner]. The trouble is being caught in an lift because the power has gone out," says Alcira Villasmil, a 44-year-old office manager. "We are living through things one would only read about happening in Africa – and it's very frustrating."