Lights out: Venezuela’s blackout

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Hello and welcome to the intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host Anne McElvoy, in for Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. The task of demolishing vast ships at the end of their useful lives is a tricky and a dirty one. But now new techniques are transforming the art of ship unbuilding. Esau and Jacob are still having that family feud, but a new translation of the Hebrew Bible from a renowned scholar is putting some old stories in a new light. First up though, After nearly a week without electricity, power is being restored to parts of Venezuela. The outages plunged a country already paralyzed by severe shortages and hyperinflation. Deeper into crisis. Electric pumps stopped working, leaving people desperate for water, while fresh food rotted in the heat. The government of Nicolas Maduro has been trying to get the power switched back on. In Caracas. People have been protesting, but there's an overriding sense of helplessness in this oil rich country of 31 million.

It's really been nothing like I've certainly ever seen here in the last three years that I've been living in Venezuela.

Stephen Gibbs writes for the Economist and lives in Caracas and he told me how the blackouts are affecting people.

Caracas, the lights have begun to come on, but that's been at the cost of the rest of the country. Now, the effects of that are extremely serious. Hospitals, many of them entirely without power because they haven't had power generation systems. That means nurses have been trying to keep premature babies alive by hand, ventilating them by hand. Anyone requiring kidney dialysis has been in a very serious situation here because there is no power. Take, for example, the city Maracaibo. It used to be the oil capital of Venezuela. One person I spoke to there described the situation as almost prehistoric, a sort of survival of a fittest situation. Because it's one of the hottest cities in the country. It's particularly severely affected by the lack of power in terms of storing food. We've seen reports of butchers selling what is effectively rotting meat, $4 in US cash. That's been another major issue. Because of the lack of electricity, the bank system has collapsed. And because of inflation here, there's no cash in local money. So the dollar rules, particularly in those very severe situations outside Caracas.

And what do we know about how the power outage was caused, if anything?

Opinion is divided. President Maduro says that it was a cyber attack from the United States. And he's come up with some sort of quite imaginative, one could say, description of how that happened. Something that almost, it sounded like something out of an Ian Fleming novel. He said electromagnetic mobile devices were put on Venezuela's electric towers by the United States, apparently, and he says that was part of a plot to push the power out. Now, the opposition disputes that and says that much more likely is that this is a sort of consequence of the long term disintegration of the electrical power system here and that the system really couldn't cope. And that's where we got to where we are now.

And how did things become so bad in Venezuela that we got to the point of people running out of food and electricity?

Well, I think it's really what's happening is the people and the government here are sort of reaping the rewards, one could say, of a system that really hasn't functioned. If you go back two decades, Venezuela's long had not sufficient electrical generation capacity, for example, to provide for its expanding population. Billions were spent. But it appears that in the sort of crony capitalism system that you have, a lot of that money went to insiders and very little of it went to actually improving the system. And with the food, there's been a similar problem. Productivity is extremely low in the agricultural sector. This country's importing more food or relying on imports more than it ever did. But at the same time as it's as its economy has crashed, it hasn't had the dollars it needs to import that food. So it's struggling to do even that. This is a government that's sort of trying to do everything but failing in quite a lot of that.

What is President Maduro now trying to do to get a grip of this situation? Indeed, what can he do?

Yes, well, President Maduro, what he's done and he's appeared several times on state television in the last 48 hours. He seems to be to a certain extent trying to sort of bring victory out of defeat. He's repeatedly said, who is it that provides electricity? It's us. You know, you should be grateful to the state for providing the electricity and you sort of only miss it when it's gone, is one of the phrases he used earlier this week. But he is under very, very severe pressure. Most of the Western democratic world now no longer recognizes him as president. There is a rival president who sort very, very much present. But meanwhile, what can the opposition do to actually unseat him in a situation where most people are sort of scrabbling around trying to find water, trying to find food, communications aren't really working properly. So it really is stalemate at the moment.

And how has Mr. Guaido, that's the lead opponent of President Maduro in this scenario, how has he been responding to this isn't an opportunity for him.

He's trying to take advantage by saying, you know, if there is a change of government here, then the lights come back on. But he's struggling partly because of this communication problem. 96% of this country for much of the last week was entirely offline. Earlier this week there was he Guaido attempted to get a protest together. A number of people who turned up to that was very thin. So he's attempting to get his message across. But it is difficult in this sort of lockdown situation.

What would be the aspect of this that could tip Mr. Maduro's supporters, the military particularly, away from him? Are they beginning to get frustrated?

There's no question that the sort of junior ranks of the military are feeling the pain just as much as anyone else in Venezuela is. You know, most junior soldiers will be earning perhaps $10 a month, which isn't enough in this current situation. But the leadership of the army and this is a military that has more generals sort of per capita than anywhere else in the world. They are to a certain extent and they have profited from this sort of chaotic, almost mafiosa, some would say style economy. And there doesn't seem to be a great incentive for them to jump or to defect. At least that may change if things get a lot worse. If this is a crisis with famine and enough people feel that the only way out of it is to change sides, that may shift, but it's. There hasn't really been significant sign of that yet.

I've got to ask you, unless you're sitting there in darkness winding up your phone, how are you able to talk to us and what's your own position at the moment?

Well, along with a lot of journalists, when this became clear that this wasn't just the usual 20 minute outage, I moved into a hotel that does have a generator. And I've been there since. That's the sort of thing that the fortunate few can do. But absolutely everywhere outside this hotel does not have running water. And actually, in fact, the hotel I'm speaking to you from at the moment does not have running water. But it is being brought in from time to time via water trucks. But no, everyone is in a difficult situation. But I think, if anything, what this has been a reminder of is this is becoming increasingly a city and a country of the haves and have nots. It used to be, and it still is, whether you've got dollars or not, but it's also now whether you've got electricity or not, whether you've got a generator or not, and therefore whether you've got water or not.

Stephen Gibbs, thank you very much for talking to us.

My pleasure.

And to hear about the stiff challenges that the shattered Venezuelan economy might soon pose for the International Monetary Fund. You can catch me in a recent conversation with the fund' chief, Christine Lagarde on our Economist Ask show, available wherever you download your podcasts. As soon as we are asked by the legitimate authorities of that country to come in and help, we will come in and we'll have a monumental job on our hands because this is a country that has not opened its door to the IMF for the last 15 years. So we have not conducted any of the annual audit that we do on all our members. So there is a lot of due diligence that we're going to have to do in a very expedited manner, but which will be important. Do you think it's likely that you will be in there for an IMF rescue on Venezuela? I think it will be fundamentally important because we play a catalyst role and the amount of financing that will be needed is, you know, significant. Our wallet will not be sufficient. Up next, Jason Palmer learns more about what it Takes to break a hulking ship down into its component parts.

How do you make a 10,000 ton container ship disappear?

So Alanga is this small town and you hear it before you see it. It's this kind of clanging, noisy industrial place, kind of as far as the eye can see. These enormous ships every few hundred yards, you know, some complete, others being dismantled, you know, as though they half disappeared, as though they'd been eaten by locusts.

Daniel Knowles is the Economist's international correspondent. He's been reporting on how one industry in South Asia might be transformed by regulations made thousands of miles away in the European Union.

This beach is, it's the world's biggest ship breaking beach. Something like a third of the world's ship by number end up on this beach. When they retire and are essentially disappeared. They're cut into pieces. Everything off the ship is sold. The steel gets sold to local mills for recycling. There are kind of guys crawling all over these things with blowtorches, just cutting them into bits. And you hear these kind of clashes as tons of steel are dropped from a ship straight onto the beach. It's a loud industrial kind of place.

It sounds like a fairly dirty business.

Yeah, so it is a dirty business. I mean ships obviously contain, they contain remnant oil, they contain chemicals and they're basically just being cut to bits by often not very well equipped workers.

But things are changing.

Well, so what's happening in the langue is there are these new regulations that have come in in Europe, kind of 6,000 miles away or so. Ship owners who have European flagged vessels have to adhere to these regulations when they are dismantling their ships, which means that the industry kind of has to clean up. What is also happening is that Maersk, one of the world's biggest ship operating companies has been trying to get yards to clean up. So on the langue you have these older yards which are cutting ships up in the old way, kind of dropping the steel straight from the ship onto the beach. But then you have new yards which have cranes and which have kind of asbestos equipment and workers with proper gear and that sort of thing and they're trying to make it better.

You spoke to quite a few people about what it's like to work there. What did they tell you?

So I visited several of these yards, one of which was the Sriram yard, which is one that has improved. It's 200 per yard, per yard. You know what they told me is that they have 200 to 250 tons of steel which they take off ships and process each day and it goes for re rolling or being melted down to be reused, you know, I mean the Indian economy requires a lot of steel for construction, for all sorts of things. So that's where it goes. It's tough work, you know, I mean, these are workers who come from northern India. They work very long hours, they live in dormitories and you know, conditions are not great. I mean, people come here because they can earn more than they do at home. But they, they, they deal with a lot of danger. You know, they're handling asbestos, they're dealing with oil, they're dealing with other chemicals that come through. There are quite a lot of, you know, industrial accidents. I mean, last year 14 workers died. When you look at the kind of older yards or the, they are dropping huge tons of steel from ships and workers are dealing with blowtorches and that sort of thing. So it's pretty dangerous work.

Dangerous work, messy work. It all sounds like this has some environmental impacts.

Yeah, so it's a dirty industry. I mean, at Elang's water, mercury and lead levels are very high. Kind of these ships contain oil which gets washed off. So a lot of chemicals and other kind of byproducts. Ships end up in the sea. Greenpeace actually got in a lot of trouble when they, they sold one of their ships for scrapping not to a beach in Alang but to one in Bangladesh. It doesn't really fit with Greenpeace's sort of ideals to be scrapping their ships on beaches. So it's controversial. So a few companies are trying to make this cleaner, a bit better for the environment and for workers. I spoke with Captain Prasant Wij from the Danish shipping company Maersk, which is the world's biggest shipping company. They've been working with a bunch of shipyards at Alang trying to raise standards up.

We have been recycling ships in China, in Turkey to a certain standard, which.

Is what we have applied to Alang.

When we came to Alang in 15.

We saw that there was a window.

Of opportunity because there were yachts which were willing to upgrade, which were willing.

To invest, had the right attitude.

So what he told me is Maersk had been recycling ships in China and Turkey and they thought that they could get shipyards in Alang to get up to those standards. So they felt that if they offered to take lower prices for their ships that shipyards would make improvements. And currently 80% of the world ships by tonnage are recycled in South Asia, usually to low standards. But it's important for local Economies and Maersk sort of argue that they can get those industries to be cleaner without kind of taking the jobs away from India where they're important to a lot of people.

So I mean, there's certain economic elements to this. But what is it that draws companies to India for shipbreaking?

There's a few reasons basically why ships end up in India, across South Asia, Bangladesh and Pakistan for the same reasons. First is that across South Asia, steel prices for recycled steel are higher. So that means that you get a higher price for your ship when you sell it. You know, other than that is that workers are poorer paid. You know, a worker at a Lang, a skilled worker might make kind of 800 rupees, about $11 a day. Most probably make about half that. And finally, yeah, just not really the environmental standards that you might expect elsewhere. So ship owners are able to get the best prices for their ships in South Asia, so that's why they sell them there. So what's changing now is that there's more pressure on ship owners to actually try and dispose of their ships in a environmentally and worker friendly way. And in particular there are new regulations that have just come in that apply to European flagged vessels which that affects a good chunk of maersk's fleets, about 40%. Companies are hoping in particular Maersk, I think, is that they can recycle their ships in an acceptable way, but while still kind of keeping the industry in India and still having the advantages that India or other parts of South Asia would have in terms of lower labor costs and higher steel prices.

So do you see in all this any lessons from the industry that kind of inform policy about other Fairly dirty industries?

10, 15 years ago, nobody really cared about the quality of ship recycling and now they do. And in particular, investors care about it, governments care about it. And so I think kind of that as much as these regulations, which are actually quite easy to evade if you really want to, are what's having the effect. I mean, if Maersk wanted to, they could just reflag all their vessels out of Singapore. You know, they don't have to comply with these European regulations, but they're choosing to because, you know, because it looks bad otherwise. So it's becoming less possible to sort of outsource the scuzzy parts of your industry to, you know, to places overseas where, you know, people at home aren't really watching the environmental damage. And I think kind of if you're looking at other industries, that's where, you know, if you're the oil sector or whatever this is Stuff you have to be increasingly aware of.

Daniel, thanks for your time.

Thank you, Jason.

American scholar Robert Alter has written a new English translation of the sacred Hebrew Bible, known to Christians as the Old Testament. The Economist US editor John Prideaux spoke with him about it.

Millions of believers interrogate every word of the Hebrew Bible. Robert Alter's translation aims to capture the literary power of the text more closely than previous versions have. 24 years in the making, it's been met with near universal praise from poets, biblical scholars and ordinary readers alike. Can you take us back to when you first started this mammoth endeavour? What did you think you were getting yourself into?

I didn't think I was getting myself into a mammoth endeavor. It had been proposed to me that I might do one of these Norton Critical editions. I said, well, the problem is I was not circumspect that there's something really wrong with all the translations. So if I were to do this, I'd have to do my own translation. So after some discussion with my agent, it turned out to be a straight up translation. I'd been reading the Bible in Hebrew since over the age 18 19, and the Hebrew spoke very much to me. I wanted to try to get a lot more of the splendor of the style in English, but I realized that. But it was very difficult to do because the structure of the languages is so different. So I thought, well, give it a try. In the end, everybody will hate it and I will hate it bit by bit. I came to a point where I said, oh my gosh, I've done almost 2/3. I really can do the whole thing.

I know lots of people who are not particularly religious who've bought your translations because they enjoy the music, particularly of the Psalms. What do you think non religious people might get out of reading your versions?

Much of the Hebrew Bible is great literature, not all, you know, there's boilerplate stuff, there has to be. But there is some very great poetry in Psalms. To you, o lord, I call, and to the master I plead. You have turned my dirge to a dance for me, undone my sackcloth and bound me with joy. I hope your listeners can hear that there's a strong rhythm in my English which really replicates the Hebrew. What prophet in my blood gets you exactly the Hebrew? Mah. All the modern translations, instead of blood say my death. Out of the astounding assumption which they repeatedly make, that modern readers cannot understand a metaphor.

Bereshit bara elohim et hashem ve' et ha' aritz veharitzaita tohu vavohu ve choshech.

Alpneit hom veruach elohim merachefetal.

When God began to create heaven and earth, and the earth then was welter and waste and darkness over the deep, and God's breath hovering over the waters, God said, let there be light. Now, of course, the older translations all say in the beginning, but it makes no grammatical sense in the Hebrew. And then welter and waste. For me, as a literary translator, trying to do whatever I can with the sound play of the Hebrew is extremely important. Sounds like this tohu vavohu. I think the effect is rather like Helter Skelter, where the rhyme gives you the sense of things intermingling and confused.

Do you mind me asking, are you religious yourself?

I'm one of those people who tried earnestly to be religious in his 20s and that sort of faded away. So someone who doesn't care a bit about God and monotheism and everything that goes with it can read these poems and these stories for their literary greatness.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. You can subscribe to the economist@examiner.com radio, offer 12 issues for $12 or 12 pounds, and we hope you enjoy the show tomorrow. Sam.