Dear Editor,
The prices for food items continue to rise each day and the average citizen is finding it very hard to cope with this situation. Today you can only buy half the amount of items that you used to buy one year ago, even as government removed the Value Added Tax (VAT) from a number of basic food items. The prices are still sky rocketing and Guyanese are now merely existing. People who live in the rural areas are being forced to pay extremely high prices for basic food items and when questions are asked consumers are told that the prices have increased in Georgetown and so they would have to pay more. More often the prices are 30 to 40 percent more than the Georgetown price.
Because of the free market system, I know it is very hard for any government to control the prices of items but the business community are taking advantage of the economic situation. Some businessmen are randomly calling prices on consumers. One day I stopped at a pharmacy to buy a certain item and asked the price and the man behind the counter at the cash register told me the item cost one hundred dollars and I told him I don’t pay that much for the item and he asked me how much do I pay and I told him fifty dollars and he said okay pay sixty dollars. This just goes to show how consumers are being cheated.
Yours faithfully,
Clive Fredericks
