The announcement by Saudi Arabia and Russia that OPEC+ will reduce their daily output by 2million barrels of oil per day, is a real bad news.
We are still reeling from the whopping price increases since last May. Some goods like the inputs of bakers rose to as high as 30%.
The price of toilet paper and chicheria went up by as high as 25%.
On the average, prices of everything went up by 25%. Will the new high prices ever go down? Historically, they don’t. They remain there or go even higher.
And now that latest announcement of cutting back oil production. How much price increases will it result in? A rough calculation would mean setting back the contents of our wallets by 10% when buying anything.
So we will be greeted by a bad new year. The purchasing capacity of whatever we are receiving as salary or as profit from a small business will weaken by that much.
If you were buying 30 eggs every week, you will soon be able to buy only 26.
The heavier thing to hear is the effect on employment. An example would be the 4,000 employees who recently lost their jobs in an export processing zone in Cebu. That is a big number from any angle. More so if you determine the number of family members those laid off were supporting. At an average of four dependents per employee, it means 16,000 people would be going hungry henceforth.
Multiply that by the number of layoffs we will be facing in export processing zones in other parts of the country, and there would be a big social problem in the government’s hands.
With the way our government structured our economy, which has become overly dependent on imports, things could only get worse.
If you have a job opportunity abroad, grab it, and might as well plan your life to settle there.
For those of us who are stuck in this country, figuring out how to survive must be Job 1 starting tomorrow.
Forget about all sorts of rhetoric or high-sounding statements, how not to go hungry is the thing to figure out every minute of the day.
So we might as well get going.**