Chiang Mai (Mizzima) - Burma’s ruling military junta has imposed rationing of fuel sold at the country’s new private petrol stations, two days after it privatised its retail oil sector, according to a sales manager at one of the stations yesterday.
The Ministry of Energy ordered the stations to limit sales to no more than 12 gallons (45 litres) of fuel per car per day from June 12 onwards.
A sales manager from a Dagon International private petrol station in Kyaukmyaung, Rangoon, said the Burma Petroleum Products Enterprise (MPPE), a department of the ministry, was failing to meet private petrol station fuel demand.
The junta had said it planned to allow private companies to distribute and import fuel, but the private petrol stations must still depend on supplies from the Energy Ministry during their 60-day trial period. Distribution of natural gas is still controlled by the government; the stations can distribute only petrol and diesel to end users.
The ministry sells petrol to the private stations for 2,350 Kyats (about US$2.35) per gallon and all private stations are required to resell to end users at the fixed price of 2,500 Kyats (about US$2.5) per gallon and 20900 Kyats (about US$2.9) per gallon of diesel. The limitation, however, will last two months after which the price will be deregulated, allowing the private stations to sell fuel at variable prices.
“They [stations] record all transactions in their databases. If a customer tries to buy [fuel] two times within a day, they will not sell”, a private petrol station customer in Rangoon said.
According to the CIA’s World Factbook in January 2008, Burma uses 43,140 barrels of oil per day and produces 21,900 barrels per day. It estimated that Burma stored more than 50 million barrels of petrol for emergency use.
Some 261 of the 271 petrol stations across the country have been privatised, and most are in the hands of junta crony businessmen.
On January 23, a fuel businessmen’s association was formed with 138 members. Its chairman is junta crony Tay Za, and vice-chairman is Aung Thet Mann, a son of Burmese military chief, General Thura Shwe Mann, the third-highest-ranking member of the State Peace and Development Council, the junta’s name for itself.
Since the dictatorship of Ne Win 48 years ago, the government has controlled fuel import and distribution and people can only buy fuel within limited quotas.
Burma watchers have said also that the junta may be imposing further controls on the fuel market to avoid, when the fuel prices are floated, the kind of inflation seen as the main cause of widespread protests in 2007.
In August that year, the ruling junta failed to announce its decision to remove fuel subsidies, which caused the price of diesel and petrol to rise suddenly as much as 66 per cent and the price of compressed natural gas for buses to increase fivefold in less than a week, leaving many people out of pocket or stranded, as they refused to pay consequent raised bus ticket prices. The monks’ “Saffron Revolution” started the following month.
http://www.mizzima.com/business/4035-rationing-felt-at-private-petrol-st...
