Asia’s prices are rising. In the Philippines, they’re soaring

Manila, Philippines – Emelie Ann Ducabo, 57, a married mother and saleswoman in Metro Manila, has been forced to become an expert at pinching pennies to feed the seven members of her household.

On the market, Ducabo buys pork, fruit and vegetables in the smallest possible quantities, but more expensive beef is totally out of the question. Instead of chicken legs and thighs, she opts for liver and necks, from which she makes noodle soup that she distributes to her husband, two adult sons, sister-in-law and her 94-year-old mother’s caretaker. Her mother follows a special diet of pureed fruit and oatmeal.

“The most important thing is to get the protein from these chicken parts that our bodies need,” Ducabo told Al Jazeera.

Every member of the household drinks their morning coffee black, without sugar, and the occasional sweet treat is limited to grated melon mixed with milk and crushed ice.

Despite their difficult circumstances, Ducabo is lucky enough to be able to take care of her boys and mother. She usually works from home as a buyer for a clothing company. She and her husband own their 40 square meter house.

The one thing Ducabo doesn’t scrimp on is the detergent for washing her family’s clothes – “I want my boys to smell clean!” – the little native bananas that are always on the table for anyone who is hungry and her mother’s adult diapers and special diet.

Prices in the Philippines are skyrocketing – and faster than anywhere else in Southeast Asia, with the exception of war-torn Myanmar and socialist Laos.

In February, inflation reached 8.6 percent – ​​a hair less than the previous month – much faster than Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and Vietnam.

While most households are tightening their belts, the situation for lower-income families is particularly difficult.

While wealthier Philippine households spend less than two-thirds of their income on food, those in the bottom 30 percent of the income distribution spend nearly 60 percent of their income on subsistence, according to government statistics.

According to a special consumer price index (CPI) used to measure cost-of-living pressures for lower-income households, inflation reached the equivalent of 9.7 percent in February – unchanged from the previous month.

The Philippines is particularly vulnerable to inflation because of a combination of factors, including high consumption taxes and increased production and distribution costs due to the privatization of public utilities, said Rosario Guzman, chief of research at the IBON Foundation, an economic think tank.

“The government can no longer intervene in the rates for water and electricity. We have the highest electricity rates in Asia after Japan,” Guzman told Al Jazeera.

Then-President Rodrigo Duterte’s introduction of an excise tax on all petroleum products in 2018, on top of the existing value-added tax (VAT) of 12 percent, had a particularly severe impact on the poor, Guzman said.

Its think tank calculated that each increase in the Philippine peso at the pump generated an additional 400 million pesos ($7.3 million) per day for the government.

President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. has rejected calls to suspend VAT or excise duties on fuel, blaming high pump prices on the war in Ukraine and other outside forces.

Jonathan Ravelas, the former BDO bank chief market strategist and now general manager of eManagement for Business and Marketing Services, said the cost-of-living crisis has exposed the Philippines’ over-reliance on imported food.

“We don’t have food security,” Ravelas told Al Jazeera, noting that the peso’s weakness against the dollar had pushed up import costs.

“Duterte did not act [a] Food Safety [programme] but just imported,” said Ravelas. “Now Marcos Jr. has no choice but to drive food security.”

“Unfortunately, there is no shortcut to food security and imports have their limits,” he added.

While the Philippine central bank has raised its benchmark interest rate to 6.25 percent, Ravelas said it must go further to reduce inflation.

“In my opinion, the Bangko Sentral should still raise overnight rates to almost 7 percent and not stop at 6.5 percent,” he said.

For Alfredo Barrun Pineda, Jr, 43, the rising cost of living was enough to convince him to stop driving an air-conditioned cab. Now he rides a motorcycle with a sidecar filled with plastic buckets, tubs, and hangers that he trades for broken electronic goods and appliances, which he then sells to junk or repair shops. A megaphone announces his presence in civilian neighborhoods.

“I earn as much from this as I do from a taxi,” Pineda told Al Jazeera. He stopped driving a taxi when he found himself paying 2,000 pesos to run his vehicle 180 miles. To cope with inflation, he said, his family eats “the cheaper vegetables.”

Pineda said he had voted for Marcos, the son of former dictatorial leader Ferdinand Marcos, who had promised to lower the price of rice to 20 pesos per kilo.

“Yes, it is still 42 [a kilo], but that’s okay. His father did a lot and all those accusations [of plunder] against him are not true.”

Some Filipinos have looked for opportunities in the cost of living crisis.

12-year-old Jan Carlo spends four days a week on the sprawling state university campus in suburban Quezon City, balancing a giant plastic tub on his head filled with fresh — and expensive — salad greens and strawberries from a vegetable stall that his stepmother runs nearby.

He’s identified his target audience: college students and matrons who jog or bike on campus who don’t mind paying him 50 pesos ($0.92) a piece of cauliflower or broccoli and 100 pesos ($1.84) for a small cup of fresh strawberries.

His busy schedule allows him to earn a little more than the monthly adult minimum wage – all of which he hands over to his stepmother – though he has recently cut back to make time for school, which he has only been attending for two years. .

“All those vegetables that I transport are all profit, because we have already earned them back [our costs] in my mother’s stall,” he told Al Jazeera.

In the meantime, families like Ducabo’s are constantly having to figure out their own ways to make ends meet.

To save transportation costs, Ducabo’s husband, Donato, a guard, sleeps most nights of the week in the barracks provided by his company.

Ducabo describes the one or two nights a week he spends at home as “our bonding moment,” when she goes the extra mile to stir-fry pancit noodles with vegetable and meat chunks and make Shanghai-style spring rolls.

Ducabo said that, ironically, their situation was better in some ways during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic because the government had been handing out free rice and other food.

“But nothing more now,” she said.

“If I got emotional about our situation and blamed the government for the high cost of food, I would have a heart attack. So I decided to just go with the flow.”