Some 30 ships lined up this week waiting to unload at a port on the central Venezuelan coast, where imports are being delayed amid an uproar over rotting food stocks owned by the government. Puerto Cabello is at the center of the scandal in which tens of thousands of tonnes of meat and milk were left to rot in shipping containers by a state-run importer, in a threat to the popularity of President Hugo Chavez's socialist government.
Among the waiting vessels are 17 carrying bulk shipments of sugar, corn, grains and other foodstuffs, an official document showed. "The problem is logistics. Many shipments were ordered at the same time and the ports cannot keep up," said a source involved in last year's nationalisation of Puerto Cabello, who asked not to be named.
Unloading should take between five to 10 days under normal circumstances, the source said. But that has been extended because the port, which lies about 75 miles (120 km) west of the capital Caracas, is not running at full capacity. For each day the ships stay at anchor waiting, the source added, the owners pay an extra $20,000 in freight costs.
Most of the containers of putrid food were found at Puerto Cabello, which has proved to be a sensitive topic for Chavez - who has routinely blamed sporadic shortages of staples on capitalist speculators hoarding for profits. Venezuela imports about 70 percent of its food, and critics of the government say the ports situation is likely to worsen as the pace of imports pick up toward the end of the year.
Carlos Larrazabal, president of Conindustria, an organisation that represents Venezuela's private industrial sector, said it was now taking as long as five weeks for ships to be unloaded at Puerto Cabello. "If we have this situation now, and no action is taken, we will have major problems in the second half (of the year)," he said.
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