by Our Foreign Desk

VENEZUELA’S housing programme has built 100,000 homes in the last 10 months, according to figures released on Tuesday.

The Mision Vivienda (Housing Mission) initiative begun under late president Hugo Chavez is now putting up low-cost housing at a staggering rate of 200 new homes a day.

Housing Minister Manuel Quevedo said the scheme had constructed a total 752,585 housing units nationwide since 2010, up from 676,000 in January.

“At this rate, one million people will be provided with homes by the end of 2015,” Mr Quevedo said.

One of many such “missions” or social programmes in fields such as health and education, Mision Vivienda was launched to provide shelter for people made homeless by the devastating floods that inundated the country in 2010.

But it has since expanded to provide housing to all, with poor families prioritised.

Houses and flats are provided free or at low cost, depending on their owners’ income, and fully furnished.

President Nicolas Maduro has pledged to expand the mission to house 40 per cent of the population by the end of the decade.

• Oil producing bloc Opec held an extraordinary summit yesterday on the crisis of overproduction that has driven down global market prices.

The meeting was called at the request of Venezuela, whose oil-rich economy has suffered from the slump in oil prices.

US ally Saudi Arabia was expected to oppose moves to cut excess production in a bid to restore prices to profitable levels.