Reply #10: Your attempt to mislead is clear. No one said a word about a replacement for school food.

[Judi Lynn]

Not even close. As I said, I maintain, it's your responsibility to learn the FACTS.

Poverty Reduction in Venezuela
A Reality-Based View

By Mark Weisbrot

~snip~
Access to education has also been greatly expanded. This is especially true at the level of higher education: from the 1999-2000 school year to 2006-2007, enrollment increased by 86 percent; estimates for the 2007-2008 school year put the increase at 138 percent from the 1999-2000 base. For secondary education, the increase from the 1999-2000 school year to 2006-2007 is 54 percent. For basic education (grades 1 through 9) the increase over this period was 10 percent; but this was already at a 91 percent gross enrollment level in 1999-2000.

Some 3.9 million school children – about half of the population between three and seventeen years of age – now receive lunches in school.

In addition, more than 15,000 government (Mercal) food stores distribute basic food items at discounts from 27 to 39 percent; and there are some 894,300 people served by soup kitchens. Some of the impact of the discounted food from the Mercal stores – but not the soup kitchens or school lunches -- should show up in Venezuela’s cash-income based poverty rate through lower prices, although it is difficult to say exactly how much.

It is therefore clear that the sharp reduction in poverty in Venezuela, as measured by the official poverty rate, captures only a part of the improvement in living standards for the poor.

http://www.drclas.harvard.edu/revista/articles/view/1100

~~~~~
Venezuela’s revolution achieves social gains
by: W. T. Whitney Jr.
March 12 2010

~snip~
Food supplementation is one success story. Eleven years ago, 252,000 children received school meals. Now, over four million receive two meals a day in schools. A million people eat at special locations set aside for meals. Another is literacy, with the rate rising from 86 percent in 2001 to 96 percent presently.

More:
http://www.peoplesworld.org/venezuela-s-revolution-achieves-social-gains/

~~~~~
The Venezuelan Effort to Build a New Food and Agriculture System
Christina Schiavoni and William Camacaro

Christina and William interviewed by Against the Grain

~snip~
Two additional initiatives to improve food security and nutrition are a national school meals program and a law guaranteeing nutritious meals for workers.29 The School Feeding Program provides universal free breakfast, lunch, and snacks to more than four million children. The Law for Workers’ Nutrition, passed in 2004, requires workplaces of twenty or more people to provide workers with either a hot meal on-site or swipe cards with “nutrition points” that are redeemable at restaurants and food stores. Venezuela’s wide range of feeding programs, combined with other forms of social support, have enabled the country to meet the first Millennium Development Goal of halving hunger and poverty ahead of the 2015 target and have also cut malnutrition-related deaths in half from 1998 to 2006.30

More:
http://www.monthlyreview.org/090824shiavoni-camacaro.php

ETC.