Venezuela registered its biggest monthly oil-production decline in a decade in May, according to data released Monday by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, signaling further trouble for a country already enduring severe economic hardship. The decline of 120,000 barrels a day, to 2.37 million barrels a day, underscores the inability of state energy company Petróleos de Venezuela SA to maintain oil-industry investments, as the region’s largest petroleum exporter suffers from a debilitating cash crunch, widespread food shortages and civil unrest. “This is very surprising,” said Francisco Monaldi, a Latin American energy policy fellow at Rice University in Houston, who closely tracks Venezuela’s oil industry. “If you want to point to the biggest problem, it is cash flow, which for PdVSA now looks worse than we had imagined.” Venezuela, which relies on oil […]