Fuel prices at all time high; premium: $10.43

We didn’t receive this next piece of news via press release. No, we got it the hard way just like everybody else. I’m talking about fuel prices, which as of midnight Sunday reached a record high at gas stations all over Belize. The new price for super is a whopping ten dollars and forty-three cents per gallon, a fifty-one cent increase. Regular gasoline jumped the ten dollar mark for the first time, coming in at ten eighteen per gallon. That’s a fifty-eight cent jump. Meanwhile, the price of diesel fuel, that last bastion of blue collar transport, rose thirty-nine cents to seven dollars and forty six cents per gallon. The reasons for the punishment at the pump are the usual ones: higher world oil prices combined with a shortage of refining capacity equal higher acquisition prices for our sole supplier of petroleum products, namely Esso Belize Limited. Esso is owned by Exxon Mobil, the world’s most profitable corporation, whose net profit last year reached over thirty-six billion U.S. dollars. That’s eleven billion more than the company reported in 2004. And if today’s news was not bad enough, it’s worth noting that Sunday night’s fuel increases do not reflect Friday’s record world oil prices of over seventy-five U.S. dollars per barrel. That shock will come within the next few weeks as the spike makes its way down the distribution chain.