EspañolPresident Nicolás Maduro and his regime, unable to maintain control of the distribution of regulated foods and other basic products, has announced that 50 percent of products produced by hygiene companies in Venezuela like Colgate Palmolive and Procter & Gamble (P&G) will be allocated toward the government program CLAP.
Last April, Maduro established the Local Committees for Supply and Production, better known as CLAP for its acronym in Spanish, which is responsible for delivering and selling food and basic products at subsidized prices.
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These products are mostly not manufactured by the state, but rather by private companies that have been obligated to sell off their production for the program.
For some time now, CLAP has not only supplied the country with food, but has also been given the task of fulfilling the needs of the season. At the beginning of the school year, for example, the government placed student uniforms in CLAP deliveries. Now, as Christmas nears, three million toys have been arbitrarily appropriated to the people, and two managers of the toy company Kreisel have been arrested.
Three days later, the program begins another arbitrary measure with the requirement that companies making personal hygiene products like Colgate and P&G allocate 50 percent of their production to CLAP, with the borderline blackmail argument that the state is the one who provides them with raw materials in the first place.
National Coordinator of the Local Committees of Supply and Production Freddy Bernal and Minister of Food Rodolfo Marcos Torres will reportedly meet with executives of these companies to inform them about the decision.
They said their model of food distribution is going to constitute combinations of personal hygiene items for next year. He said “speculation and the mafia” have affected the acquisition of personal care products such as toothpaste, shampoo and soap, among other things.
This is not the first time the government in Venezuela has announced such a measure. The largest food company in Venezuela, Empresas Polar, now allocates 12 percent of its production to CLAP.
Source: Runrunes