Is Trump Going to Let Venezuela Starve?
Venezuela is in an underreported hunger crisis that is getting worse by the day, and the Trump administration’s de facto alliance with the unelected and unpopular Chavismo government is only adding to the risks of a disaster. Francisco Rodríguez, the respected Venezuelan economist who has sounded the alarm, warns: “Food stocks are running dangerously low. You need an emergency plan for Venezuela. You need to get the World Food Program and other humanitarian organizations in there right away.”
Firsthand details were provided by a prominent figure in the Venezuelan medical community. That source declined to be quoted by name, fearing reprisals from the regime. But they told The New Republic from Caracas that, in technical terms, the country is already in a “public health crisis” and skidding toward a “food emergency.” The source said: “Since 2023, our country has been in uncontrollable inflation. Our population increasingly does not have the economic wherewithal to obtain sufficient food. Indications are rising of infant malnutrition and of hunger among the elderly.”
Jesús “Chúo” Torrealba, a longtime major opposition figure inside the country—he has one million followers on X—explained that hunger in Venezuela does not always follow classic patterns. “The inflation is terrible,” he said. “And hunger here breaks some of the usual stereotypes. We do have hungry children in poor neighborhoods. But we also have retired university professors, whose pensions have evaporated, who can now only eat because their former students take up collections for them.”
Phil Gunson, a Venezuela-based analyst at the respected International Crisis Group, adds: “Triple-digit inflation is accelerating toward a return to hyperinflation and worsening poverty rates that are already at record levels.”
Meanwhile, the mainstream U.S. media is once again missing the story (with one honorable exception). The cable news networks and the major newspapers devoted lavish attention to opposition leader Maria Cortina Machado’s January 15 visit to the White House, during which she handed over her Nobel Peace Prize to Donald Trump. But the media continues to ignore the looming humanitarian crisis.
The most immediate cause of the rising risk of hunger is the ongoing U.S. naval embargo that blocks Venezuela’s oil exports. The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that in marketing year 2025–26, Venezuela will have to import 1.62 million metric tons of corn, which is 56 percent of its needs. Corn is the key ingredient in the arepa—the flatbread that is a staple in the national diet and is as central in the national consciousness as the tortilla is in Mexico. No oil exports means no earnings to pay for imported corn.
The current status of the U.S. blockade is unclear; American military forces on January 20 boarded and took control of the seventh oil tanker that was carrying Venezuelan oil. At the same time, though, there are credible reports that the United States did broker the sale of some Venezuelan crude; the first buyer was a company called Vitol (which employs a senior trader who had donated millions of dollars to Trump’s reelection campaign). Naturally, any oil export earnings should be allocated immediately to ameliorate the food (and medicine) crisis, but no one knows where the money that’s been collected will end up.
Even if the U.S. ended the blockade tomorrow, the crisis would persist. A genuine democratic government in Venezuela would have to respond as food shortages and hunger grow. But Nicolás Maduro and his ruling circle lost the July 2024 election in a landslide, and people there estimate that only one in five Venezuelans still support his successors. Acting President Delcy Rodríguez’s only real constituents are Donald Trump and his advisers, not the 20 to 24 million Venezuelans who remain in the country. Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the apparent brain of the U.S. operation, are allying the U.S. with a regime that opposition figure Torrealba calls “Madurismo without Maduro.”
While Venezuela’s regime is getting by, thanks to its deference to Trump, it remains a repressive and corrupt force in the lives of those it ostensibly governs. Human rights groups on the scene estimate that it still holds nearly 800 political prisoners, many of whom were active in the opposition movement that actually won the 2024 election. The regime is releasing some of them slowly, but most are still locked up. Human Rights Watch has pointed out that “dozens have been held incommunicado for weeks, months, and some for over a year.” Before his release on January 22, Rafael Tudares—the son-in-law of 2024 election victor Edmundo González—was among the prisoners. Jailed for more than a year, he was regarded by human rights groups as a “hostage” of the regime.
The regime’s corruption also is contributing to the looming food crisis. Torrealba pointed out that Venezuela’s heavy dependence on imported corn and other foodstuffs has also raised risks because “our national import and distribution system has been riddled with corruption from 2012 onwards.” In other words, even the resumption of food shipments will not necessarily allow food to reach the people who are hungry.
The food emergency is descending on a nation that has been in acute crisis for more than a decade. During Trump’s first term, the U.S. followed the suggestions of right-wing Venezuelan exiles and declared economic war against the country, in the mistaken belief that the crisis would topple the regime. Instead, the economist Rodríguez has outlined in great detail how the U.S. onslaught, along with criminal mismanagement by the Maduro government, detonated the greatest economic collapse in any nation in recent history that was not the result of an actual war. Some eight million people have already fled, a quarter of Venezuela’s pre-crisis population—and that desperate exodus could soon restart.
Once more, the Trump administration will be partly to blame. Torrealba explained: “In a democratic country, food shortages translate into votes against the government. But in a semi-totalitarian system like ours, the government accepts hunger and uses it as an additional weapon of political repression and social control.” It doesn’t take much imagination to predict that the regime will divert any oil earnings to raising the pay for its secret police and high-ranking military.
Torrealba’s warning is ominous. Venezuela’s regime has regularly proven how ruthless it can be. Trump and Rubio are smug right now, still basking in the success of the January 3 U.S. military raid that captured Maduro, and confident that they can work with their new allies and smoothly “run Venezuela” as they promised. But their troubles are only beginning.