Reporter Pulls Food Prices Out of His Hat

Reporter Pulls Food Prices Out of His Hat / Fernando Damaso
Posted on July 11, 2015

Fernando Damaso, 9 July 2015 — A few years ago an official reporter for
the newspaper Juventud Rebelde, when he was a correspondent in
Venezuela, wrote fanatical features about the late Venezuelan leader.
Upon returning to Cuba he set about "clarifying," in dense articles, the
functioning of agricultural markets and other issues related to domestic
trade. It's the same as the article about ground turkey and "floor mop"
steak.

Now, calculator in hand, he rambles on about prices in the agricultural
markets. In an article entitled "Sofrito Continues Just Like Before" he
states that "the Cuban family, between January and March this year, had
to pay 1.10 pesos per pound for garlic and 76 cents for onion, the same
as in 2014." He adds that "a sweet potato, which before cost you a peso,
now costs you four cents more."

I really don't know which top hat he pulled these prices out of; they
are completely unrelated to reality. First of all, garlic is not sold to
retail consumers by the pound, but by the head, a small one selling for
from 2 to 4 pesos. A pound of onions has fluctuated between 10 and 15
pesos, and one sweet potato has risen to between 2 and 2.50 pesos.

He admits something that is undeniable, "prices of almost all
agricultural products have continued to rise," but he blames "low
production, the existence of private restaurants and cafes, tourism
growth, and declining imports, which have caused supply not to meet
demand, generating higher prices."

Next he tackles problems he can't solve, and develops a strange thesis
"on the impossibility of generating an algorithm to determine, with some
degree of certainty, the correspondence between supply and demand for
modeling prices in the agricultural market," followed by other
convoluted notions, "in my opinion," as he habitually repeats.

"Sofrito continues just like before" because the system doesn't work and
is unable to solve the problem of feeding the Cuban people, as has been
more than demonstrated by 56 years of failures.

This, presumably, the reporter doesn't say.

Source: Reporter Pulls Food Prices Out of His Hat / Fernando Damaso |
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