New Delhi: Venezuela wants to trade with India using Indian rupee.
Venezuelan foreign minister Jorge Arreaza said that his country wants India to buy its oil using Indian rupee, which the South American country plans to use for trading Indian food products and medicines.
India has a similar agreement with Iran and Bhutan and it looks like that Venezuela wants the same.
“We don’t want to use dollar at all,” Arreaza told reporters.
“Venezuela has similar arrangement with Turkey, China and Russia and a proposal in this regard has been discussed with the finance and the petroleum ministries of India,” Arreaza said.
“We want to import technology, food products and medicines by paying (Indian) rupees and they will pay us (Venezuela) not in (US) dollars but in rupees,” he said.
The reason cited behind the move was the sanctions imposed by the US.
Nearly 44 Venezuelans have now been sanctioned by the United States government, including President Nicolas Maduro himself, whom the Trump administration has branded a “dictator”.
Currently, the trade between India and Venezuela takes place using dollar.
India has invested substantially in the oil sector of Venezuela through its oil Public Sector Undertaking and the South American country is the second largest oil supplier to India.
The Venezuelan foreign minister, who was here to attend the Founding Conference of the International Solar Alliance, said President Maduro wanted to attend the event but he had to drop the plan due to the polls back home. Arreaza, who led the delegation, was accompanied by the head of the Ministry of Oil and Mining Popular Power, Vielma Mora, and the Ministry of Foreign Trade and Investment, Manuel Quevedo.
In a meeting with Suresh Prabhu, India’s minister of Commerce and Industry, the Venezuelan delegation presented the contents of the nation’s new Law for Foreign Productive Investment, drafted by President Nicolas Maduro.
The law, approved in December 2017 by Venezuela’s National Constituent Assembly (ANC), seeks to promote economic development through foreign investment and diversification to lessen reliance on fluctuating oil prices.
According to shipping and industry data, India’s oil import from Venezuela has declined in over half a decade as the South American nation is facing a severe economic and political crisis.
India’s oil imports from Venezuela averaged around 300,000 barrels per day (bpd) between November, 2017 and February, 2018, a drop of about 20 percent from the same period a year earlier and the lowest such level since 2012, according to data from shipping sources and industry.
Venezuela’s oil production plunged to the lowest in decades last year, with the country afflicted by quadruple-digit inflation, a lack of hard currency and a crippling recession.
“President Maduro is seeking re-election and he plans to visit India once he gets re-elected. He will also extend an invitation to Prime Minister Narendra Modi to visit Caracas,” Arreaza said.
Venezuela is facing a humanitarian crisis as food shortages have led the regime to start distributing rabbits, and to ask people to let them reproduce and eat them amid growing international sanctions.
The crisis in Venezuela is the socioeconomic and political crisis that the country has undergone since Hugo Chávez’s tenure and which extended over the years into the current presidency of Nicolás Maduro. It is the worst economic crisis in Venezuela’s history.
