Tame price increases

It’s no surprise that inflation is the top concern of the people, as recent surveys have shown. The non-stop increase in prices of food and fuel, as well as other items of daily necessities, presents the biggest challenge to the average Filipino – not just those considered “poor,” but also the so-called middle class.

I am one of those “middle class” who works and have to feed my family of four, send my two kids to school. While we are a two-income family, we still find it more and more difficult to meet our daily needs, and our efforts to try and save something every month is not always successful.

The family time together, eating out and maybe buying the kids new shoes or something nice, is also getting less frequent. As they say, bilang na bilang because we have to be ready for any emergency.

Of course, we are luckier than many other families, since at least we both have work and we are still able to eat three times a day, which I know many fellow Filipinos may not be able to do.

But government must take control of price increases, as well as supply, especially of food. While external forces like wars in different parts of the world do affect costs, especially of fuel, there are things government can and must do to keep food affordable and available to the general population.

I hope our new Secretary of Agriculture Francis Tiu Laurel Jr. will be able to institute measures to immediately tame food prices, even as he has announced longer-germ plans for improving our agriculture. Such plans are good, but hungry stomachs cannot afford to wait for the completion of these plans. — Sandee Tan-Salazar, Pasig City