President Gustavo Petro announced that he will take measures to lower the price of energy and meat tariffs, assuring that the main cause of the rise is speculation.
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During the report on the 100 days of his government, the president said “that the price of energy rates, even inefficient, was reduced thanks to the pact reached by the Minister of Mines, Irene Vélez (with the businessmen).”
However, he acknowledged that “There is a percentage of electric power in Colombia that is too high based on speculation. It is not understood how, having all the reservoirs full and full, we are paying 400 pesos for a kilowatt hour, as if we did not have water generating energy.”
And he added: “the differential, when we should have cheap energy than in many years. It is speculation and I believe that we must act, that unlike beef, electricity is a general input that causes an inflationary effect in almost all the products in the family basket.
He said that if there is an anti-inflationary measure, “it is put an end to speculation in electricity prices”
Measures to reduce the price of meat
President Petro also referred to the high price of meat in Colombia and said that measures must be taken to regulate said price. In this sense, he mentioned that the National Institute for Food and Drug Surveillance- Invima-“did away with the municipal slaughterhouses and left the refrigerators in the hands of a monopoly”.
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“The case of inflation and the Colombian Invima (…) has reached that point because the Invima ended the figure of the municipal slaughterhouse. We must turn back, today the internal price of meat has risen not because It costs more, but because it is equal to the international price of meat. The producer of this is hunger in Colombia. It is speculation and it occurs because there is a monopoly, more precisely an oligopoly, in the transformation of cattle into meat for public sale. There is than democratize it”.
He mentioned that Invima “has to play the role of democratizing the economy and not concentrating the Colombian economy.”
