As hunger stalks Venezuela, government encourages city-dwellers to start planting, by Jim Wyss.

Urban farming is a global trend from Miami to Hong Kong, but here it’s as much necessity as hobby.

A poll by DatinCorp in April found 86 percent of those surveyed bought “less” or “much less” food than they used to, and only 54 percent said they ate three meals a day.

Petra Meneses, a retired 66-year-old doctor, said the soaring prices of vegetables had driven her to get serious about home gardening. In her neighborhood, a bag of green peppers is running about 1,800 bolivares — that’s about $4 dollars, or almost a tenth of her monthly social security check.

“With everything being so precarious we have to go back to the land,” she said. “Even if that land is inside the city — in our homes.”

In a land so naturally rich that anything put in the ground grows, and blessed with oil, the people are starving due to socialism. Under socialism, the economy has regressed to do-it-yourself food. The division of labor and specialization that makes society immensely wealthier has broken down, because socialism cannot coordinate and motivate people adequately.

Some prominent Australian commentators lauded Chavez as the way to go a decade ago. Crickets now. See the suicide of Venezuela.

Scarcely a mention of Venezuela now in our PC media: “we don’t talk about that”.

Venezuela is the socialist nightmare of our time. It is kept out of the media in the same way that the famines in the Ukraine were kept out of The New York Times in the 1930s.

hat-tip Matthew