Fuel costs down, but will G.O.B. tackle the cost of living?
The high cost of living is on everyone’s mind and when we canvassed citizens around the old capital, the topic resonated. Men and women wanted to know when will grocery store prices follow the route of the fuel prices and decrease. This morning on Channel Five’s Open Your Eyes breakfast show, Prime Minister Dean Barrow was asked what the government plans to do to arrest the high cost of living.
Prime Minister Dean Barrow
“I believe that in this month, in the month of December, there is going to be a lowering in the cost of flour to consumers. Generally, as I said, there is a lag time between the decline in oil prices and the fall in food prices as a result of the cost of production becoming cheaper in consequence of the oil price decline. I think then that within the next month or two there should be this measurable decrease in food prices. One of the difficulties always is to get the merchants to translate savings in terms of their acquisition costs into lower prices for the consumers. I’m not taking after the merchants, but there is a difficulty there and as a consequence, the consumer protection agency will have to become more muscular, will have to become more activist in order to ensure that lower prices are passed on to the consumer.”
The lowered fuel prices are a benefit to Belizeans, but the dramatic decrease wiped out the extra income from the windfall tax and projections are that the precarious state of the U.S. economy will result in major declines in tourist arrivals over the Christmas and into next year. With G.O.B. feeling that major pinch in its coffers, where will it get the necessary fiscal resources to inject into the economy and complete its projects? As strange as it may sound, the P.M. said this morning that the recent flooding had the unusual benefit of opening up access to additional funding from abroad so as to increase public sector funding.
Prime Minister Dean Barrow
“We are going to be accessing funds—the amount has not yet been determined—from the Inter-American Development Bank for infrastructure rehabilitation. So the latest question about streets and highways is to be answered in that fashion. The facility that is available is up to twenty million U.S. dollars. I am not saying we are going to get all of that from the I.D.B., but we are going to get significant monies from the I.D.B. for infrastructure rehabilitation. When you are spending that money on the rehabilitation, you are creating jobs, you are assisting the economy generally because there is all that money that is being spent and that circulates generally. In addition to the I.D.B., the Caribbean Development Bank has indicated that they too want to lend us money for infrastructure rehabilitation as a result of the floods. There is a project that we are putting to them now that we have discussed and that they have already agreed on in principle and that will see the resurfacing—lifting of the Northern Highway and the airport junction and especially between Belize City and the Haulover Bridge.”
The C.D.B. funding will help to increase the number of lanes on the Northern Highway to four, while the drainage system in Belama is also going to be improved. Barrow is also look at funding from the World Bank and estimates that government will spend between seventy to a hundred million Belize dollars on infrastructure rehabilitation.
