Prices of basic commodities are soaring like a runaway train. Without price controls, a lot of our people will go hungry. Add to this the increasing number of jobless, which could only increase as many industries will close shop due to low demand for their products caused by high prices– which can only go higher with the high costs of raw materials and other industrial inputs.
Why can’t government lower such prices? Because everything is imported. Lowering these by force will just stop importers from procuring these to our shores and factories will grind to a halt, to remain at a standstill.
Since time immemorial, our government never effectively worked at attaining self-sufficiency so we don’t have to import everything.
Stand before a vehicle and count the number of its parts that we manufacture efficiently in this country and you might end up making the tips of your thumb and your forefinger meet to form the number zero.
Take the outermost layer of the car which is the paint. What car painters use are sourced form Japan, or if you want the highest quality, they use those made in Germany.
The rubber in cars are either from Japan, Germany, China, India or Taiwan. Perhaps some of these are from Malaysia or Thailand. Don’t we have rubber trees? Yes, we do. But even our bicycle tires come from the aforementioned countries. What our backyard industries can only make are the rudimentary rubber bushings.
How about the steel that makes the bulk of the car? We can only produce iron ore and those of copper, gold and other metals. As to processing them, however, we can not do it in a competitive way as other countries do.
Same thing with the plastics, the wires and other smaller components of the car. Some small parts like integrated circuits are made here but done by foreign companies in export processing zones which, technically, are imported if we buy them.
With this reality, any trouble in the international scene like the war in Ukraine that disrupts the supply chains feeding our industries means closure of our factories, unemployment, scarcity of basic commodities, etc., and even social chaos when our economic backwardness is even pushed further to the extreme.**