Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele announced on Tuesday that he will send to Congress a proposal to suspend the tariffs on basic basket products for 10 years, with which it seeks to combat the rise in prices that continues to hit the pockets of the poorest in the Central American country.
“Today I will submit a proposal to suspend all tariffs on all products in the expanded basic basket, as well as on 70 other food products for a period of 10 years,” the president wrote on his official account on the social network X, formerly known as Twitter.
The president’s decision comes a week after he warned merchants to stop “abusing” prices of basic products and threatened to apply the full force of the law to them, as he has done with gangs.
“I am going to make a call like the one we made to the gangs at the beginning of 2019, when we told them to stop killing or don’t complain later. Well, I am going to give a message to the importers, marketers, wholesalers and distributors of food: stop abusing the Salvadoran people or don’t complain later,” said the president in a national radio and television broadcast.
Authorities have said they have identified abuses in the prices of basic products.
To try to alleviate the situation, the Ministry of Agriculture has established so-called “agromarkets” in almost the entire country, where producers, without intermediaries, are selling at lower prices.
A basket is made up of foods that provide the minimum caloric requirement for a person to carry out an activity, such as dairy products, meats, eggs, beans, sugar, fats, bread or tortillas, rice, vegetables and fruits.
According to a state survey, the expanded basic food basket for a family of three is worth $420.91, an increase of $31.86 compared to the cost in 2022.
Recently, the right-wing Nationalist Republican Alliance (Arena) presented to Congress an initiative to reform a law in order to remove the tax on all basic products, but the proposal did not have the support of the majority of deputies in the unicameral Congress controlled by the ruling party Nuevas Ideas.
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