Thank you.
The thing is that you have to understand how poverty is measured in Venezuela. There are a lot of ways, but let's talk about two. The government measures poverty by calculating the exchange rate between the bolivar, the Venezuelan currency, and the dollar at the official rate. We are one of only three countries in the world that have control of foreign currency: Cuba, North Korea, and Venezuela. The government has an official rate and they say that the exchange rate is one dollar per ten bolivars. The actual price that you find on the black market is one dollar per 1,100 bolivars, so more than 200 times the amount. It's crazy.
And that's only when you measure the income. When you add to that measurement other data such as access to food, access to health care, access to education, then things get worse. How did such a big increase in poverty occur in such a short time? Our situation now is a consequence of a bad model, a disastrous economic and social and political model that started in 1999. The government led by former President Hugo Chávez had an obsession against the private sector. They started to harass them, and as a consequence, they took almost all food production.... Let me give some examples. All natural oil for cooking, cement and steel, coffee, rice, sugar, and things like that were under the control of the government. When they started to harass the private sector and expropriate a lot of factories, the impact on the population wasn't so bad because we had a big income from oil, and the government imported food. So national production was destroyed but we had a lot of income from oil so we could substitute the products that we didn't manufacture in our country.
What happened in the last year? Over the last three years, we have had an extreme decrease in oil incomes. So you have three big problems. First of all, they destroyed the natural production. In the first years it didn't matter because the government had enough money to buy food and medicines on the international market. The second hit came when the international price of a barrel of oil fell, so we didn't have the food being produced in our country and we also didn't have the money, the dollars, to import it. The third big problem is corruption.
I'll say just this so you can get a clear picture of how corruption is killing our country. These are official numbers provided by President Nicolás Maduro. The government estimated that just through having to import food, they lost $60 billion. So $60 billion was lost on importing food and medicines because of the exchange rate. You have a lot of corruption; you have no production in your country; and you have no income from oil with which to import those supplies, so after three years, it was like a big wave that started building a long time ago hit hard because of the decrease in the price of oil.