Price Hikes Result of International Factors

John Briceño

One of the hot topics that Prime Minister Briceño also touched on this morning was the high cost of living. So while the economy has been rebounding faster than the IMF had predicted it would, the cost of living is also going up. PM Briceño said the current rate of inflation that we’re experiencing is linked directly to COVID and dictated by world super powers.

Prime Minister John Briceño

“Many factories when there’s a COVID outbreak, they have to shut down until they clean up and get ready. Also, it has created a backlog. Shipping has gone up. People are waiting months before they are able to get their products from the factories because they are not producing like before. And because it is limited, you know what happens, right. When we only have one and five ah we want, we start to bid for the price. So that is completely out of our control, unfortunately. I wish I can tell you that it is something that we can control but it is out of our control that these prices continue to go up more and more.  What we can do is to work – and we’ve already spoken with Minister Mai, who has Supplies Control as part of his portfolio – to speak with the people there and to see how we can do some sort of monitoring to ensure that there’s not price gouging, but simply because the prices continue to go up. But unfortunately, there’s not much we can do when the prices go up in China or the United States or anywhere where it goes up because we are importing it into Belize.”