The country's inflation rate accelerated to 1.7 percent in the month of September and may continue to increase if the prices of diesel and gasoline maintain their upward trend, the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) official reported on Tuesday.

In a press conference, Undersecretary Claire Dennis Mapa reported that the main source of acceleration of the September 2025 inflation rate compared to 1.5 percent in August is the increase in the prices of transport with 1.0 percent inflation rate from (-0.3 of) previous month.

"It has a 71.3 percent share in the overall inflation in the country. The slow decrease in the price of gasoline with -0.9 percent inflation rate and the high price of diesel with 5.1 percent inflation rate have contributed to the high inflation on transport," he said.

Mapa noted that the inflation rate of transport since February 2025 or in the past six months was negative until it became positive in September until the first week of October.

"On a weekly basis the price increases particularly diesel, for gasoline there are weeks that the prices go down but the net effect remain positive so we are looking into it because now is the first week and we see an uptick, if this will continue in the succeeding weeks it will become positive and it might become much bigger than 1.0 percent, so that is the risk in the transport," he explained.

"And we know in the past that if the inflation rate of transport increases, in a few months the other commodity groups will follow," he added.

Mapa said the second source of acceleration of last month's inflation is the faster increase in the price of food and non-alcoholic beverages with 1.0 percent inflation or a total of 22.9 percent share in the country's overall inflation rate.

He noted that the fast increase in the price of food and non-alcoholic beverages was due to high prices of vegetables, tubers and others with an inflation rate of 19.4 percent which is the highest recorded since January with 20.2 percent.

"The rain and flooding particularly in the vegetable producing provinces had an impact last August and September... and we see that it may continue in the coming month because we had storms in the past month, so there is a possibility that our inflation rate would be elevated," said Mapa.

"We have items which prices are already high, first the biggest is the cabbage with an overall inflation of 53 percent, second are the chillies and peppers at 42 percent, pumpkins 33.6 percent, so there are many items under the commodity group of vegetables tubers and cooking bananas that has double digits inflation rate," he added. Robina Asido/DMS