President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. should prioritize bringing inflation down instead of marshalling the House of Representatives to create the Maharlika Wealth Fund, which has stirred fears of possible misuse among various sectors.
Former Cabinet Secretary Rigoberto Tiglao Jr. advised Marcos to prioritize easing inflation, saying the President has lessons to learn from previous administrations.
“He should get the Congress he controls to stop working on the silliness called Maharlika Wealth Fund and should instead draft a comprehensive anti-inflation program, in the way President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo formulated and executed her government’s Economic Resiliency Plan in 2008,” he wrote in his Manila Times column.
Tiglao said Marcos is partly to blame for the 8% inflation in the Philippines, which is among the worst in ASEAN.
“Debate as much as you want whether Marcos must share part of the blame for our soaring inflation, one thing is crystal clear to me: His administration doesn’t have a clear and detailed strategy to contain inflation. I find this scary,” he said.
Tiglao said Marcos’ stint as the concurrent Agriculture Secretary has been ineffective, with food prices up by 10 percent.
“It seems Marcos and the agriculture department’s main response to addressing the rise in food prices has been to take a page from his father’s programs, which is the Kadiwa idea of getting producers to sell to retailers directly, to remove traders’ margins,” Tiglao said. “This idea didn’t work during his father’s time, it won’t work today.”
“How can mom-and-pop Kadiwa outlets compete with the large traders’ sector and the supermarkets? Kadiwa stores, by one estimate, don’t even account for 1 percent of retail sales of agricultural products.”
He said that unless Marcos gets his act together, there could be a repeat of the 50 percent inflation recorded in 1984, during the presidency of Ferdinand Marcos Sr.