The Food and Allied Workers’ Union (Fawu) will march to the National Treasury in Pretoria on Monday to protest against the pending introduction of a sugar-sweetened beverages (SSB) tax, now referred to as the sugar tax.
“The determination to mount this march was informed by [the] admission from the Treasury and their researchers that there will be job losses emanating from this sugar tax and the silly claims that those lost jobs will be fictitiously created elsewhere, say in bottled water or 100 percent juices factories, yet there is no scientific study to prove this,” Fawu general secretary Katishi Masemola said on Sunday.
“We support a quest for a healthy nation and want an obesity-free population if that means a citizenry not prone to heart problems, strokes and hypertensions, diabetes, and other non-communicable diseases (NCDs). However, we do not believe that a tax on sugar-sweetened beverage products will be a mechanism to achieve the intended health objectives.
“We think this will simply become another ‘sin tax’ like those taxes on alcohol and tobacco products. If this tax is introduced as a revenue-raising exercise for the government fiscus we may agree, but if it is introduced as a health policy intervention we beg to differ and we can argue with alcohol and tobacco that those taxes may not have worked as claimed as policy steps for all sorts of realities,” he said.
If anything, it may well be that the issue of obesity was beyond the sugary beverages and other sugary products, as well as other fat-intensive products. The question was would those products be taxed as well? “It is precisely for these reasons that we are marching to the Treasury in order to call for a summit in getting a comprehensive discussion on obesity and the needed interventions to deal with NCDs.
“In any case, we do not think that some of the arguments, such as that obesity and consequential diseases are of lifestyle such as [the] narrow consumption of sugary drinks because there may be multiple factors revolving on dire socio-economic conditions…,” he said.
“Anyway, one job loss is too many jobs to lose… given the high rate of unemployment coupled with persisting poverty and the widest inequality on Earth while, equally, it is important to deal with needed positive health outcomes from preventive measures and treatment interventions, without the use of inappropriate or blatant instruments.
“We hope that the Treasury and the entire government would then realise the importance of convening a summit of the all relevant stakeholders and role players to deal with the overall issue of obesity and the causes of NCDs diseases to the nation,” Masemola said.
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