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Everybody must learn to cut their cost of living by all means. Learning addition skills and securing extra jobs might be another means of overcoming this hard life. The government must also make policies that will help alleviate the suffering of the masses.
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I don't disagree with everything your said about cooperative. It is one of the potent solutions to the current food and other essential commodities crisis most people are facing due to this global economic problems. But currently, human needs has become very complex and might not be handled by cooperative. Human need more than food and other basic needs to live a comfortable life. And most of these essential commodities are controlled by big companies that are not willing to lose their influence on they have on the people. Data and airtime for internet and phone communication might not be basic needs but they are so essential that some people might not be able to survive without them.
Cutting costs will not only solve this problem, When there is price inflation, the price of goods and services increases while your salary remains the same. No matter how you cut costs and depend only on salary to survive, it is going to be difficult to survive in such an economic environment, but the escape route to this is having multiple streams of income.
Where government needs to play a very important role in such a harsh economy is in subsidizing the transport system, this will help reduce the high cost of living, If there is a high cost of transportation it will automatically affect all sectors of the economy, using my country for example, the recent high cost of PMS which hike the price of transportation has worsened the situation.