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Food

Venezuela Wants to Put Fingerprint Scanners in Grocery Stores

Due to a massive food shortage in Venezuela, President Nicolás Maduro has come up with a level-headed solution to ensure that everyone has access to basic goods: electronically fingerprint every shopper in the country.
Photo via Flickr user Quinn Dombrowski

Food shortages are no stranger to Venezuela. Despite the fact the country is rich in oil and other natural resources, and has had a generally strong growth over the past several decades, Venezuela is currently in the midst of total economic hell, with a massive deficit and sky-high inflation. On top of that, it can't even stock its grocery store shelves with basic necessities.

Everything from masa to rice to toilet paper has been affected during the current food crisis, which can be traced back to strict price controls instituted by Hugo Chávez as a way of making certain products to people across the economic spectrum. Naturally, though, President Nicolás Maduro blames the shortage on a CIA plot to destabilize the country.

And Maduro has an equally level-headed solution to the crisis, too: Instead of reforming the price controls, he wants to start fingerprinting all grocery shoppers to ensure they aren't hoarding food.

Hoarding and smuggling are, in fact, a problem in the country. According to the BBC, up to 40 percent of Venezuelan goods end up across the border in Colombia, where they fetch far more money than they do back home. With fingerprinting, the government will be able to make sure that hangry consumers won't be able to buy too much vegetable oil, because that would be a damn shame.

It's like the "do with less so they'll have enough" rationing slogan from WWII-era America, except this is just a wee bit more Orwellian. If the plan goes into effect, stores will introduce electronic scanners that will record biometric data for every grocery shopper in the country. "The biometric system will be perfect," Maduro said last week in an announcement.

Clearly, this is a man who's never seen Minority Report.