Oil production, the main source of foreign currency earnings in Venezuela, dropped to 740,000 barrels per day in March 2019, compared with the average production of 1.6 million barrels during 2018 and 2.2 million in 2017.

In order to look for sources of income in dollars for vital imports and also look for mechanisms to evade the sanctions imposed by the U.S. Department of the Treasury, which included the Central Bank of Venezuela in the list of sanctioned entities, the Central Bank sold 13.7 tons of gold from its reserves for $570 million in a recent two-week period. The reserves of the Central Bank of Venezuela are approximately $7.9 billion, the lowest level in the past 29 years. The low oil revenues, the critical level of the reserves in the country and the sanctions that restrict foreign exchange movements are causing a significant decrease in imports of basic products.