The fight for food has begun in Venezuela. On any day, in cities across this increasingly desperate nation, crowds form to sack supermarkets. Protesters take to the streets to decry the skyrocketing prices and dwindling supplies of basic goods. The wealthy improvise, some shopping online for food that arrives from Miami. Middle-class families make do with less: coffee without milk, sardines instead of beef, two daily meals instead of three. The poor are stripping mangoes off the trees and struggling to survive.

“This is savagery,” said Pedro Zaraza, a car-oil salesman who watched a mob mass on Friday outside a supermarket, where it was eventually dispersed by the army. “The authorities are losing their grip.”

What has been a slow-motion crisis in Venezuela seems to be careening into a new, more dangerous phase. The long economic decline of the country with the world’s largest oil reserves now shows signs of morphing into a humanitarian emergency, with government mismanagement and low petroleum prices leading to widespread shortages and inflation that could surpass 700 per cent this year.

The political stakes are mounting. Exhausted by government-imposed power blackouts, spiraling crime, endless food lines, shortages of medicine and waves of looting and protest, citizens are mobilising against their leaders. In recent days, Venezuelans lined up to add their names to a recall petition that aims to bring down the country’s president, Nicolás Maduro, and put an end to the socialist-inspired “revolution” ignited 17 years ago by Hugo Chávez.

“This can’t continue,” said Angel Rondon, a mechanic who now sometimes eats just once a day. “Things have to change.”

The rumor spread quickly on a recent Tuesday evening in the poor farmlands near Barlovento an hour east of Caracas: A truck carrying rice had tipped over, and food was free for the taking. Glenis Sira, a mother of seven, grabbed a plastic bag and ran from her cinder-block shack. More than 1,000 people joined her in scrambling to reach the village of La Fundacion before they realised there was no rice truck, only rumour.

“We have never had this level of need,” said Sira, one of several witnesses who described the melee.

For decades Venezuela was one of Latin America’s more stable and developed democracies, with a middle class accustomed to the benefits of oil wealth. Economic crises in the 1980s and 1990s battered many Venezuelan families. But the Chávez era was marked by rising oil prices and declining poverty, leaving few people prepared for the sickening free fall of the past few years.

Sira has long been a proud “Chavista,” convinced that government spending can create a more equal society.

“I’m a Chavista and, damn it, this situation is hard,” she said. “That is why the revolution is being killed. Because we are hungry.”