In September 2017, as Venezuela sank deeper into a food crisis that had emptied supermarket shelves and left families queuing for hours, a senior government minister appeared on state television with an answer. Venezuelans, he said, should breed rabbits for meat. The animals were cheap, reproduced quickly, and could be raised at home. The proposal, formally known as Plan Conejo, or the Rabbit Plan, was presented not as a joke but as a serious part of the government’s strategy for food production. Within days it had traveled around the world, and it has remained one of the most widely remembered symbols of the Maduro government’s handling of the crisis.
The plan matters because it was both absurd and revealing. A government that had promised abundance was now telling citizens to raise their own dinner in a backyard hutch. The laughter it provoked outside Venezuela was real, but inside the country the joke landed differently. For people who were already skipping meals, the instruction to breed rabbits was not funny. It was a measure of how far the state’s capacity to feed its own people had collapsed.
A Country That Could Not Feed Itself
Venezuela entered the crisis as an oil-rich country that imported a large share of the food it consumed. For years, high oil prices had paid for those imports, while domestic farming was squeezed by price controls, currency controls, and the expropriation of farms and food businesses. When oil prices fell, the money for imports fell with them. Farmers who could not sell at a price that covered their costs stopped producing, shopkeepers who could not restock at controlled prices stopped stocking, and the state stepped in with rationing and subsidized food boxes that were irregular, politicized, and far too small for the scale of the need.
By 2017, shortages had become a routine part of daily life. Queues formed before dawn outside supermarkets and state food outlets, and families spent a growing share of their time and income simply trying to find flour, rice, cooking oil, and milk. Hyperinflation made the problem worse, wiping out the value of wages and savings almost as fast as they were earned, so that even when food was available, many people could not afford it. Surveys by Venezuelan universities and reports by aid groups described a population that was eating less and eating worse. The crisis was not caused by a single drought or bad harvest. It was the result of years of policies that had weakened the country’s ability to produce and distribute food.
The Announcement: Plan Conejo
It was into this setting that Freddy Bernal, then the minister for urban agriculture, introduced Plan Conejo. The logic, on its own terms, was easy to follow. Rabbits reproduce quickly, need relatively little space, and can be fed on grass and vegetable scraps. A single breeding pair can produce many offspring in a year, and rabbit meat is lean and high in protein. For a government promoting urban agriculture and self-sufficiency, the rabbit looked like an ideal small animal for city dwellers to raise. Bernal presented the plan on television, holding up rabbits and explaining how families could keep them at home and eat them when they were grown.
The government distributed rabbits through communal organizations and encouraged people to take up the scheme. The message was framed as empowerment: instead of depending on supermarkets, imports, or state handouts, Venezuelans could produce their own food. In the government’s telling, the plan was practical and patriotic. But there was no acknowledgment that the state’s own policies had helped create the shortages, and no admission that a backyard rabbit could not replace a functioning food system. The problem was presented as a lack of initiative among ordinary people, and the rabbit was offered as the remedy.
Why the Plan Flopped
The plan failed almost immediately, and for reasons that anyone familiar with Venezuelan households might have predicted. Many of the people who received rabbits did not eat them. They kept them as pets. Bernal himself later acknowledged the problem, noting with frustration that families had given the animals names and treated them as companions, and that some had even decorated them with ribbons. The admission became the story’s most quoted detail. It captured the gap between a government that saw a rabbit as a unit of protein and a population that saw a small, tame animal as a pet, not as dinner.
Beyond sentiment, the practical obstacles were considerable. Raising rabbits for meat requires clean water, suitable feed, housing that protects them from heat and disease, and veterinary care, all of which were in short supply. It requires knowledge of breeding, slaughter, and butchering, and a willingness to do work that most urban families had never done. Even for those who followed the plan, the scale was tiny. A few rabbits could supplement a family’s diet, but they could not feed a city, let alone a country of tens of millions. A rabbit could not fix price controls, broken supply chains, or hyperinflation.
What the Video Captures
The video at the center of this chapter walks through the announcement and the reaction it provoked, with a tone that is amused, incredulous, and then increasingly sober. It shows how the plan was presented, how it was received in Venezuela and abroad, and why it became a shorthand for government failure. Its strength is that it does not treat the rabbit plan as an isolated curiosity. It places the scheme in the wider collapse of the Venezuelan economy, where price controls destroyed production, expropriations drove away investment and expertise, and hyperinflation wiped out savings. Against that background, the instruction to breed rabbits reads less like a quirky agricultural policy and more like an admission that the system had failed.
Absurdity That Is Also a Tragedy
The rabbit plan endures in public memory because it is a perfect emblem of a particular kind of failure: a government out of answers, reaching for a simple solution to a complex problem and missing the human reality of the people it governs. The scheme was not cruel in the way that a purge or a famine policy is cruel. It was thoughtless. It asked hungry people to solve a national crisis one hutch at a time, while the institutions that should have fed them continued to fail. Behind every joke about Plan Conejo was a family that could not find food for dinner.
That is the lesson the chapter leaves behind. The rabbit plan did not cause Venezuela’s food crisis, and its failure did not deepen the crisis in any measurable way. Its significance is as a symptom. When a state that controls vast oil wealth and an extensive apparatus of food distribution cannot keep its supermarkets stocked, and its answer is to hand out rabbits, something fundamental has broken. Venezuela needed functioning markets, secure property rights, sound money, and honest government. It got rabbits instead, and the rabbits, for the most part, lived.