Wow, starting last year, we (the people living in Singapore) had tons of price increases to face. And it continued till today. Just recently, it was the price of rice which jumped up like 30% in just 3 weeks. Looks like someone is really trying to play the food market and the poor is suffering due to this. I mean price of rice hardly every fluctuates at all in the past and suddenly, it went up 30% in just 3 weeks. It is not like the demand of rice had suddenly increase or the supply of rice had fallen in just 3 weeks. Of course, the weather could have played a part in limiting the supply, but how did it all happen in the last 3 weeks?

How about the price of all sort of food stuff? Price of chicken, sugar, flour, coffee and tons of others have risen like nobody’s business. Sure, we heard that there is a increase in demand for food worldwide. But how is it possible that there is a sudden increase in demand for everything at the same time? I mean is there a sudden population surge in the world that I didn’t know about? Or is there something or someone controlling and manipulating the supply and thus controlling demand at the same time?

I think another unfair price increase is the fares of public buses and MRT. Public bus operators often blame the rising price of petrol/diesel for the increase and claim that they have no choice but to pass the cost to their customers. But then they made record profits. And when the price of petrol/diesel drops, they didn’t reduce the fares. Come on, I mean that’s just ridiculous to blame their fare increase on the price of oil but when it drops, they don’t even bother to reduce the fares. That’s the problem with monopoly (or duopoly) in Singapore. Of course, another problem is the government who failed to do something about that. Probably the main reason is that most of the major shareholders and directors of these public transport companies are also very much related to the government.  Furthermore, the bus and train services are really lousy. We get delays, slow speeds as well as extremely dirty buses. And a lot of us poor folks do have to take such pathetic public transport to and from work everyday. I wonder if one day, our ministers were to forced to take public transport, I wonder how will they feel if they sit down in our mobile public cesspool called SBS.

Well, I guess the only group that really suffers from all these price increases are the poor in Singapore. I am not saying that the poor in other countries are not suffering, but their price increase is being restricted and thus they do not face such huge rise in prices unlike in Singapore. Food prices is already very high here and with an increase of 30% on foodstuff, how many can afford to eat? And our government is as usual not doing anything serious about it.