When Will Fuel Prices Go down? Soon, Says PM Briceño

John Briceño

As fuel prices across the world are starting to take a dip, Belizeans have been asking when they will start to see the same at home. It was a topic that Prime Minister John Briceño had addressed before when he explained that the government would keep the prices where they are for a little while until the government recovers some of the losses it absorbed when it kept the prices below the fifteen-dollar mark. Following Monday’s house meeting, the media got a chance to ask PM Briceño again: for how long. This was how he responded.

Prime Minister John Briceño

“All Belizeans want relief, including myself, but as I said earlier on – we explained that we we’re going to do is hold down the taxes or reduce the taxes to try to keep the fuel steady because fuel could have gone to fifteen dollars or more (per gallon) but I did say that once the prices start to go down, we want to hold the price a little bit longer to try to recoup back some of the taxes because then if we nuh have the taxes, we can’t do the work that people are asking from us. So we’re trying to recoup that but what we’ve been trying in the Ministry of Finance is probably to recoup the losses over a longer period. So right now we’re working on that to see how we could start to reduce and I think we did – reduce the prices a little bit. We can’t reduce it as fast as other countries, because for instance, when we buy a million gallons of diesel, the United States is buying a hundred million. So obviously the prices that they get are much better than the prices that we get. We need to take that into consideration. We are a small player so we have to take the prices that they give us.”