Prime Minister on Fuel

Dean Barrow

Barrow’s administration has come under fire for recently increasing the import duties on fuel. That action in effect caused Regular and Diesel pump prices to go up, even as the acquisition costs went down. While it wasn’t a popular decision, PM Barrow maintains that it was better than any other taxation alternative. And it’s been an effective measure, since Barrow claimed today that by the end of the year G.O.B. would have realized additional revenue of perhaps more than fifty million dollars.

Prime Minister Dean Barrow

“We will of course have to do our balancing act and perhaps take off some of the import duties that we put on. While none of us knows what’s going to happen and even the experts—and so you would concede that you and I are not—even the global experts seem to be unsure of when that inevitable rebound will take place. I’ve seen schools of thought that suggest that we haven’t hit the bottom yet and that prices could go as low as twenty dollars and they will not start to go back up before the end of certainly the calendar year. So if and when that does start to happen, indeed we will have to manipulate the import duty application some more. By then of course, it will not be import duty, it will be excise. Part of what we are doing in the removal and moving to an excise regime on imported fuel and fuel products as well. But by the time we have to do that, if in fact we have to do it, I think we will be well on our way to making the target we set for ourselves. That fifty million or so that we say we expect to realize is conservative. There are experts who’ve looked at current volumes, who’ve look at the fact that people will now spend more and who therefore say that over a full year, we will get significantly more that the fifty million or so we budgeted for. So again, if towards the end of the year, there has to be an adjustment to see government getting less, we are confident that that won’t take place until a point in time where we would have already gone clear or be pretty close to it with respect to our revenue target.”