Consumers brace for hike in LPG prices

MANOLITA Enerlan feels like being hit by multiple whammy.

Enerlan, who runs a small eatery along Gorordo Avenue in Cebu City could barely cope with the rising prices of meat and vegetables.

Now, she had to face a sharp rise in the prices of liquified petroleum gas (LPG), the main cooking fuel for households and small eateries, starting
today.

“Mahal na kaayo ang karne. Ang uban utanon, mahal pud. Nya karon, hasta gasul mahal na pud. Ambot na lang unsaon pa namo pagkita ani (Meat is already expensive. Some vegetables are also expensive. And now, even the prices of LPG have gone up. I don’t know how we could make a profit,),” she told Cebu Daily News.

She said that while her eatery would make P1,500 to P2,500 per day, about 70 percent of that would be used to buy the ingredients for her menu the next day.

Enerlan was anticipating her net profit to go down with the scheduled increase in the prices of LPG.

To maintain her net profit, she planned to reduce the portions of her servings while raise the prices of her fried food by P1 per serving.

“I might charge for the water also because at present, I am giving it for free,” she said.

An ABS-CBN report said prices of LPG would go up by P3 to P4 per kilo or P33 to P44 for an 11-kg tank due to the higher international contract price of LPG for June. The report cited industry sources.

The increase followed the series of oil price hikes. The biggest was on May 22 where prices of gasoline went up by P1.60 per liter, diesel by P1.15 per liter, and kerosene by P1 per liter.

According to Rep. Arnel Ty of the party-list group LPG Marketers Association, the prices of LPG would usually follow the prices of gasoline and diesel in the world market.

But the Department of Energy (DOE) said they had yet to receive official notifications from LPG companies.

Lawyer Rino Abad, head of DOE’s Oil Industry Management Bureau, told CDN in a phone interview that LPG companies would usually inform them of price hikes or rollbacks once a month, specifically toward the end of each month.

“If ever the LPG price increase will push through, this will be the first price hike this year. In the past month, there were only rollbacks in the price of LPG,” he said.

From January to May, he said there had been a net price decrease of more than P3 on LPG prices.

Abad explained that the DOE would monitor international prices through the Mean of Platts Singapore (MOPS) for guidance and to check if prices imposed by oil companies were justifiable.

But while prices of oil products had been on the rise lately, Abad said there were indications that there would a decrease in prices next week, giving consumers a breather.

Just like Enerlan, 47-year old Leticia Valizado was also in a quandary how to sustain her small eatery in the wake of the expected increase in LPG prices.

Valizado and her husband, Marlon, had just opened their small business near their house in Barangay Tabok, Mandaue City in January, to earn a little since the remittance given by their daughter who worked as a factory worker in Japan was not enough to pay the tuition of their two sons who were still in college and in senior high school.

But whatever little profit they got from their small business would be reduced if prices of LPG would go up.