Reuters: Fish for flour? Barter is the new currency in collapsing Venezuela
RIO CHICO, Venezuela (Reuters) - Under the midday sun, dozens of fishermen wait to sell their day’s catch by a lagoon in the town of Rio Chico on the Caribbean coast of Venezuela. But they aren’t expecting cash in return.
Instead, they’re swapping mullets and snappers for packages of flour, rice and cooking oil.
“There is no cash here, only barter,” said Mileidy Lovera, 30, walking along the shore with a cooler of fish that her husband had caught. She hoped to exchange it for food to feed her four children, or medicine to treat her son’s epilepsy.
In the hyperinflationary South American country, where bank notes are as difficult to find as chronically scarce food and medicine, Venezuelans are increasingly relying on to barter for basic transactions.
Payment for even the cheapest of goods and services would require unwieldy piles of banknotes, and there simply are not enough of those in circulation.
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