(Carlos Garcia Rawlins/Reuters)

Education is no longer a priority for many poor and middle-class Venezuelans who are swept up in an all-consuming quest for food amid a drought-fuelled wave of looting and riots. In border towns like La Fria, where this boy (below) is being kept home from school, Venezuelans are turning to the jungle for food as government-promised rations fail to arrive in the crisis-hit nation of 30 million.

(Carlos Garcia Rawlins/Reuters)

Students still turning up to class face rolling blackouts.

Blackouts mean no lights or fans — a serious impediment to learning for those expected to study in the stifling heat of the equatorial jungle. When the power cuts out, these students in Seboruco, near the Colombia border city of San Cristobal, take their studies outside in the hopes of catching a breeze.

(Carlos Garcia Rawlins/Reuters)

(Carlos Garcia Rawlins/Reuters)

Venezuelans spend much of their time lining up for supplies.

Coping with the highest inflation in the world, teachers, like most other Venezuelans, are missing work in order to line up for food and medicine. This woman was photographed at a supermarket in the Petare neighbourhood of Caracas last Monday.

(Federico Parra/Getty)

Classrooms are increasingly being left empty.

Classrooms like this one, set up in a garage in La Fria town, located in the verdant Andean state of Tachira, stands empty mid-week.

(Carlos Garcia Rawlins/Reuters)

Empty stomachs in the classrooms.

In La Fria's public school, students are going without their state-sponsored lunch program due to nationwide food shortages.

(Carlos Garcia Rawlins/Reuters)

The math textbook reads: Made in Venezuela.

(Carlos Garcia Rawlins/Reuters)

President Nicolas Maduro is being blamed for the crisis.

In April, Maduro's government (currently facing a recall referendum) closed schools along with the offices of many public sector workers in an effort to save electricity. Many students just stopped coming altogether to help their parents procure staples like flour and rice in neighbouring Colombia that they can no longer find or afford at home. These are Sharon Roa's sons at home on a weekday.

(Carlos Garcia Rawlins/Reuters)

Venezuela's crisis is environmental as well as economic.

Reuters photographer Carlos Garcia Rawlins has been covering the oil-rich nation's economic and environmental crisis. He shot this feature as well as another on the receding waters behind Venezuela's giant Guri dam and Venezuelans' reliance on foraged mangoes.