Boozing set to get harder on the conscience
Drowning your sorrows will not be as easy in future as large health warnings on alcohol cans and bottles will be in the consumer’s face.
The Department of Health has passed a regulation forcing all alcohol manufacturers to ensure a health warning label is now an eighth of the size of the bottle, can or box.
This has to be implemented by 2020, but the industry says the new law is impractical.
Department of Health spokesman Popo Maja said the law was intended to “nudge against alcohol abuse” but conceded the department did not expect it to change people’s harmful drinking behaviour.
Director of the South African Medical Research Council’s Alcohol & Drug Abuse Research Unit Professor Charles Parry said: “Our current labels are easy to ignore — small, hard to read, no pictures and on the back of containers. We need to try something different.”
South African Liquor Brand Owners Association CEO Kurt Moore said the regulations were “not practical. The surface area or size of the container are not universal even for all 750ml bottles. The current modus operandi is to e-mail a copy of the label to the Wine and Spirits Board. Does the manufacturer send the bottle as part of the approval process? We don’t believe delivering bottles as part of the approval process is practical.”
Board secretary Olivia Poonah agreed the new law would mean bottles would have to be sent to them, making the approval process “challenging”.
Parry said more was needed than a warning: “People need to be better educated about the content of alcohol containers and the number of standard drinks per container, the caloric content [number of calories], and the other ingredients.”
The regulations also require all seven legislated health warnings to be rotated within a period of 36 months on the same product.
Moore said: “We do not know how government will enforce the regulations. Will retailers have to ensure customers get all seven warnings in 36 months? Our view is it will be very difficult to enforce.”