MANILA – Former president and now House Speaker Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo remains hopeful that the rising inflation rate can be addressed, even as it continued to surge to a fresh nine-year high at 6.7 percent in September.
When asked for comment in a chance interview on Friday, Arroyo recalled that during her presidency, inflation hit 6.6 percent in March 2009 but it went down to 1.5 percent by June of the same year.
“What I can say is that it happened to me before but then within a few months we were able to bring it down to 1.5 percent,” Arroyo said.
“So it can be done,” she added.
An economist herself, Arroyo advised the country’s economic team to “move faster” on the implementation of their policies which, she said, are “more or less correct.”
However, noting that the inflation is “most felt” by the people through food prices, Arroyo reiterated that increasing the budget and improving the agriculture sector is one key to solving the country’s economic problems.
The Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) said food and non-alcoholic beverages; housing, water, electricity, gas and other fuels; and transport are the top contributors to the overall inflation.
The House Speaker said she is pushing a “tall order” of an additional P20 billion to the Department of Agriculture’s (DA) budget next year.
“I’m trying to see whether we can increase the budget of the DA (Department of Agriculture) this time to P20 billion which is a very, very tall order but that’s what I am trying to tell the committee that’s doing the amendments,” she said. (GMA News)
