Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley said each consumer in T&T had the power to choose what they placed in their food baskets. He was responding to questions about the food items removed from the zero-rating list, which may cause the average citizen to pay more for food items.
Speaking to the media in Tobago yesterday, he said the food items that were removed were not essential and may very well foster a healthier nation.
“If you look at what has been removed from zero-rating, you would be hard to convince me or anybody that those are essential items in the diet of Trinidad and Tobago.
‘In fact if it is that there are difficulties with those items in the diet, then there might be a silver lining behind that cloud, that it may push us to a more proper diet involving the kinds of foods that made us who we are when we were strong.
“You do have some responsibility for what goes into your food basket and if you begin to exercise that responsibility, you would be surprised how this impossible price that can’t go down, finds its way down, and what the Government is going to try to do is encourage consumer power, consumer power is what is going to give us some assistance and some relief to some of the fears that you may have,” Rowley said.
In light of the perceived increase of grocery items in the country and impending impact on Tobagonians who pay higher prices for groceries, Rowley also commented on the issue of supermarket owners in Tobago who placed exorbitant mark-ups on their food items although Value Added Tax was reduced to 12.5 per cent.
He said: “We acknowledge that there are certain things that happen with respect to Tobago. Tobagonians who supply goods in Tobago, justified on the basis of the transportation issue, because the people in Point Fortin has the similar issue.
“They have over land transport, Tobago has sea transport but the sea transport is heavily subsidised and I think there is a certain level of double counting in Tobago and the fact that something goes on a boat, doesn’t mean that you have to double the mark-up, especially when the person who is buying it already has paid for the boat trip” he said.
Meanwhile, in response to the same issue Chief Secretary Orville London said he held an opposing view. He said the Tobago House of Assembly did a study years ago comparing transportation costs between the source market and various parts of T&T and prices were comparable to some establishments in Trinidad.
“I think if you check it out, in fact there are some of our supermarkets in Tobago, whose prices are better than many areas in Trinidad because of the relatively low cost of transportation and the fact that some of them are chains and they are able to buy in bulk and get the benefits from that,” London said.