Philippines’ inflation crisis: will Duterte feel the pinch?
With the cost of everyday goods on the rise, Filipinos are tightening their belts and looking to their government for answers – while their president is intent on blaming Trump and the US
He has raised prices at the restaurants he runs by 5 per cent to 12 per cent, but if he goes any higher, his customers will not be coming back.
“There’s a [Peruvian] restaurant that I manage that uses a lot of cilantro. And even though we have secured our supply for this, prices have gone up so high that we needed to cut down usage of it,” said Him. “We have increased prices but we can only increase them so much. We are perpetually cost engineering our recipes to look for alternatives to lower the prices so we can maintain our competitiveness.”
An inflation crisis is brewing in the Philippines, and Him is not alone in scratching his head about it.
This month, the Philippine Statistics Authority announced inflation for August hit 6.4 per cent year-on-year, the highest in nine years.
The average retail price of regular milled rice was 45.27 peso per kilogram in the first week of September, an increase of 19 per cent from a year ago.