General Secretary of the People’s Progressive Party (PPP) Dr Bharrat Jagdeo once again outlined measures taken by the government to cushion the rising prices for certain commodities throughout the country.
Dr Jagdeo was at the time responding to the opposition’s ‘distortion’ of statements made by His Excellency, President Dr Mohamed Irfaan Ali on the issue.
“We’ve made it clear that we have seen some price increases in Guyana and we have been trying to tackle it, and a lot came because of imported inflation because of what’s happened in the COVID period… and even now and other countries have feared worse in addressing these issues,” he stated.
He noted that the government has tacked the issue in several ways which include using a lower Cost Insurance Feight value to calculate the taxes.
Dr Jagdeo stated that the government made interventions to deal with an international situation affecting all countries which is growing food prices and growing inflation, by intervening on commodity price increase.
“Despite global changes in prices, despite Covid, because of direct government policies, we have seen lower mortgage rates. We have seen constant electricity prices…constant prices for fuel and transport prices…reduced water rates and …lower bandwidth costs, every one of those five items goes into the cost of living, not just food prices. And, we acknowledge that food prices have gone up and we are trying to tackle this,” he stated.
He explained that the government is forgoing more than $80 billion of taxes by removing 50 per cent excise tax on fuel, diesel and gasoline”
“For every gallon of gas that you buy or every gallon of diesel, the government basically subsidises it with $500.
Although the fuel prices went up globally, it kept the cost of production, especially for industries that use a lot of diesel, it kept it constant and it also kept transportation costs constant because we didn’t see an increase in transportation costs because of higher fuel. You check around the world whether other countries have done that,” he stated.
He noted that despite Guyana importing all its fuel, the price has been kept constant because of this intervention, which benefits all Guyanese.
In addition, $66-70 million USD in fuel subsidies for GPL has kept electricity rates constant.
“If we didn’t give them that money from the government to subsidise it, they would have had to pay higher fuel prices. They would have had to increase the electricity bill by 30 per cent,” he explained.
He noted too, that since the government took office, the water rates have dropped by 5 per cent.
“I’m only speaking about recurring cost you know. I’m not speaking about capital because we are pumping a lot of money into the investments on the capital side which is like 13 new water treatment plants now which will benefit nearly 250, 000 Guyanese,” he stated.
In addition, since the government liberalised the telecommunications sector, people benefit from more data.
“The same sum of money you are paying but your allocation now for data use has gone up ten times more, that has changed. Nobody speaks about that, and why did this happen? Because we liberalised telecommunication as soon as we got into office,” he stated.
Mortgage rates have also gone down, because of incentives to Commercial Banks.
Other cost of living measures include support to small businesses and the expansion of the part-time job programme will continue.
The government remains firmly dedicated to continuously improving the standard of living of all Guyanese as demonstrated by the constant execution of Guyana’s transformative agenda.