This is one of the post of Sen. Chiz Escudero in his official Twitter account @saychiz. The thing that brought him up to post such tweet is maybe because of undeniable and booming increase of prices in goods particularly in the price of rice lately.
And that is really a problem that should put onto discourse by the government and the Philippine Stocks Authority (PSA), National Food Authority (NFA), and the Department of Agriculture (DA). Anyone who is a citizen of this country has a concern about this increase in the price of rice. So typically a consumer who’s having rice as a basic food consumption will be getting annoyed by this increase in price. We can also consider the business establishments which are affected in their business by these price increase.
So what can the PSA, Secretary of NFA and DA and the government can do to help solve this issue and extinguished this problem regarding overpricing? It seems these problems are just repeating itself as the government failed to come up with the solutions to lessen the burden of the Filipino citizens. It’s looks like that the agricultural progress of our country has impeded, even we are supposed to be a rice producing country but we can’t produce that much to supply the need of rice and we are obliged to import from other countries which is another expense of the country and can be a source of corruption in the part of Bureau of Customs. And make imported rice as a reason to increase the prices of rice in the local markets. Minimum wage earners are more likely to be affected of any price increase since their earnings don’t increase same as the price increase so they literally have small buying power.
This is a timely issue since we are now experiencing rice shortage at the same time they are increasing the price so common citizens will really notice and complain about it. Actually maybe we have a lot of supplies of rice but there are some that are hoarding that’s why the prices in the market increases. That’s one situation that the government must pay attention and penalise those who commit such crime. And maybe put a price ceiling so that the pieces in the market will not be controlled by the sellers themselves. The government should consider this as a serious situation and start making actions. One thing also is reviewing the tax reform law, maybe it’s also one of the reason why the price increases.
This tweet of Sen. Chiz has 10 retweets and 32 likes, but it doesn’t need a lot of retweets or likes to be credible, since we are experiencing this issue in our daily lives. And our lives is affected especially our buying power with the goods in the market. Also the credibility of such post doesn’t need high amount of likes or retweets since you don’t need to like that post in order to prove it, as I’ve said earlier we are already experiencing it.
You can really sense the tone of Sen. Chiz regarding with this issue, and posting it in twitter aside from its really an issue now it catches more attention and voice now. But it makes us think why just complain and not do a thing to resolve this. It seems that in his tweets and same with his other tweets, he is only calling some attention in a particular group in the government to do a thing in a particular issue. If we imagine this tweet for example in a newspaper, you can have lot of readers also. Social media has a lot of audience too, and information spreading is really fast. But one thing is for sure whether we are aware of the issue or not and if it’s big or small issue, the government is just so slow. Senators blaming and complaining but don’t work for the change.
By:
Ardeth Sinamban
Jence Carlo Servano
References:
https://www.philstar.com/headlines/2018/08/22/1844786/rice-prices-8th-straight-month
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