Peace imminent; pain to linger
Even with a US-Iran peace deal, returning to pre-war fuel price levels will take another six to12 months.
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Even with a US-Iran peace deal, returning to pre-war fuel price levels will take another six to12 months.
The guns haven’t fallen silent yet, but oil markets are already pricing in peace. Anticipation of a US-Iran ceasefire has begun pulling crude prices lower, and for millions of Filipinos who have spent months absorbing the downstream consequences exacted by the Middle East conflict — at the pump, at the palengke, at the jeepney terminal — the prospect of relief feels overdue.
But the Department of Energy is not ready to declare the crisis over. And on that point, it is correct.
Energy Secretary Sharon Garin plainly made the case last Monday. What began as an oil problem has metastasized into an inflation problem, a household spending problem, an agricultural and commodities problem.
The emergency declaration that has been in place since March was always about more than fuel prices. It was about the cascading effect of energy costs on an economy where the poor spend a disproportionate share of their income on food and transport — both of which are acutely sensitive to fuel prices.
The declaration gives the government tools it would not otherwise have: the ability to intervene in supply chains, cushion key industries and respond with some flexibility to disruptions.
Lifting it prematurely, before the structural effects had unwound, would be an act of administrative tidiness that would serve no one living on a fixed income.
What is less defensible is the timeline for price normalization.
Energy Undersecretary Alessandro Sales was candid: even with a deal, returning to pre-war fuel price levels will take another six to 12 months.
This is not, as some fear, because the government paid inflated prices for reserves and needs to recover its outlay. The Philippines operates under a deregulated oil pricing regime — pump prices follow global benchmarks, and the state does not absorb losses to be passed on later.
The lag is structural. Supply chains disrupted by conflict do not snap back overnight. Tanker routes must reopen, refinery throughput must recover and market confidence — sensitive by nature — must consolidate around a durable peace before prices sustainably fall.
But structural explanations are cold comfort to a tricycle driver whose margins have been compressed for months, or a sari-sari store owner who has watched her supplier prices climb while her customers’ purchasing power shrank.
The honest reckoning is this: the Filipino consumer has been functioning as an involuntary shock absorber for a geopolitical crisis not of their making.
The emergency declaration was the right call, and lifting it may still be premature. But the government cannot allow the legitimacy of the declaration to become a substitute for urgency.
The tools that the emergency provides — the ability to intervene, to cushion, to direct — must be deployed actively, not held in reserve.
Peace in the Gulf, if it holds, will do what no domestic policy fully can: arrest the source of the problem. Until then, the emergency is real, the suffering is real and the obligation to act — not merely to monitor and reassess — remains.
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