Fawu to march against sugar tax

MONDAY NOVEMBER 28 2016 THE FOOD and Allied Workers’ Union (Fawu) was due to march to the National Treasury in Pretoria today to protest against the pending introduction of a sugar-sweetened beverages (SSB) tax, known widely 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 yesterday.

“We support a quest for a healthy nation. 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,” he said.

“It is precisely for these reasons that we are marching to the Treasury to call for a summit and a comprehensive discussion on obesity and the needed interventions to deal it. 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 involved.” – ANA