PM Briceño Meets with Chamber of Commerce

Stuart Leslie

Prime Minister John Briceño met with the Belize Chamber of Commerce and Industry this afternoon here in Belize City to discuss a number of issues pertaining to the rising cost of living.  It is the second in a series of discussions with the private sector organization in an effort to address serious concerns regarding inflation and price gouging.

Stuart Leslie, Cabinet Secretary

“There is this continuing discussion in Cabinet.  Every Tuesday, the ministers discuss and it goes on sometimes for hours, addressing the issue of cost of living.  What more can the government do to help ease the cost of living and I know it’s easy to beat up, every time you go to the store and the price of this going up and the price of that is going up.  But just about everything that we produce locally or that comes in from abroad has inputs that come from somewhere and so because Belize buys so much from the United States we import inflation.  And so the cost of living is something that we try as best as possible to control.  For example, the government subsidizes fuel.  The government has tried to subsidize the farmers by giving a million dollars worth of fuel to help the large portion of the Orange Walk cane farmers in the BSCFA.  They’ve allowed other subsidies in place to try and keep the cost of living down.  Now one thing that the government did was to meet with the retailers and say to them, “Look, we are coming after you on price gouging.  We’re not going to allow you to gouge the Belizean people.  We’re going to put inspection in place.”