The increased consumption of water bottled in supermarkets and stores is “two or three times” more than usual, according to the representatives of those businesses. From the Center for Retail Storekeepers, Baristas, Self-Service Workers and Allied Workers of Uruguay (cambadu)They even claimed that retailers ran out of stock of bottled water.
One of the leading bottled water companies, hellohas the logistical capacity working at its best and this increase in demand exceeded distribution capacitiesas he learned The Observer.
For this reason, the government is considering the possibility of fetch bottled water from other areas of the country and, if necessary, import it. “There will be a monitoring of the prices of bottled water and The necessary operations will be implemented for a possible importif necessary,” said the Secretary of the Presidency, Álvaro Delgado, at a press conference on Tuesday.
The options that the government manages is that the local companies import from other countries or that the State does so from Argentina or Brazil. In any case, the Ministry of Economy and Finance (MEF) is considering exempting the importation of bottled water from taxes.
In turn, “it is also on top of the table” ask the bottling companies in the interior of the country, which are about 60 large, medium and micro-enterprises, to import bottled water to Montevideo and the metropolitan areaexplained sources from the Ministry of the Environment to The Observer, They added that these companies have “idle capacity” at the moment.
This last step is similar to the one taken by the Municipality of Montevideo (IM) that authorized the bottled water marketing that come from other parts of the countryfor a period of six months beginning last Wednesday, May 17.
In this case, the water must have registry of the Ministry of Public Health (MSP) and of the department of origin. The authorization bears the signature of the director of Health of the IM, Virginia Cardozo, and aims to combat the water crisis that the country is going through, given the drought and the drop in the level of reserves to supply Montevideo and the area in particular metropolitan.
Supermarkets and warehouses with uneven stock
Daniel Menéndez, general manager of the Uruguayan Supermarkets Association (ASU)said Tuesday that there will be no water supply problems despite the increase in demand for bottled water.
“It is notorious that water consumption has increased OSE water salinity product. The sale is two or three times higher than usual. But it will not generate shortage problems. There will be no problems with supplying water in the short and medium term“, Menéndez said according to Telemundo.
For his part, he President of Cambadu, Daniel Fernándeztold the Así Nos Va program on radio Carve that “the small businesses that are entrenched in all the neighborhoods” have stock for this week.
“Nobody has 300 bags of water. We sold excessively from one day to the next. We duplicate the order and they do not deliver the duplication and after two, three days they do not deliver the product. That’s how it was and the bottleneck came that we were left almost all the retail trade without water,” he said.
