SA Canegrowers challenges Sugar Tax Campaign and calls for honest debate and home-grown solutions
21 October 2024
The push to double the sugar tax on sugar-sweetened beverages is being driven by an American-funded NGO, based on misinformation and misrepresentation of facts. This move risks the livelihoods of thousands of small-scale growers across rural provinces, where the sugar industry provides much-needed employment.
SA Canegrowers, representing 24,000 small-scale growers and 1,200 commercial farmers, is calling on HEALA (Healthy Living Alliance) to cease misleading the public and instead engage in an honest, fact-based debate about the sugar tax.
HEALA claims to advocate for 'food justice', and uses this as a guise to fight against the sugar tax. It asks people to sign a petition to call for the raising of the sugar tax in order to address hunger and the need for affordable food. While more than two-thirds of the South African population is food insecure meaning they do not consume enough calories to sustain a healthy lifestyle, according to a recent study by the Human Sciences Research Council, commissioned by the Department of Agriculture, increasing the sugar tax won’t address this.
It is misleading to trick people into signing a petition on this basis.
It is also important to note that HEALA is funded by the Global Health Advocacy Incubator, an initiative of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, which receives financial support from Bloomberg Philanthropies. This raises an important question: should wealthy American figures like Michael Bloomberg be determining South Africa’s food and sugar tax policies? Surely, the solution to South Africa’s food and nutrition challenges must be locally driven, taking into account the hunger and malnutrition so many South Africans face.
Additionally, HEALA and partners are spreading serious misinformation around the sugar industry.
HEALA often points to corruption at sugar producer Tongaat Hulett to explain why the sugar industry as a whole is in crisis - and detract from problems caused by the tax. While Tongaat Hulett did indeed suffer from fraud and financial mismanagement, this is not the reason there are struggles in the broader sugar industry. The accounting fraud involved the misstatement of property and land values, artificially inflating the company’s profits by R12 billion, and when discovered led to a collapse in share price and losses for investors, including pension funds. However, this isolated case of accounting fraud is not the reason for the industry's struggles.
HEALA's insistence on linking the sugar industry’s challenges to Tongaat's mismanagement that impacted pension funds, shows a willful misunderstanding of the sugar industry.
Furthermore, HEALA and its allies frequently attack the findings of the NEDLAC study that showed the sugar tax led to 16,000 jobs being lost, claiming it was not peer-reviewed. Yet academics who promote the sugar tax use the South African Quarterly Labour Force Survey (QLFS) to argue there were no job losses in the sugar sector from 2018 when the tax was introduced without properly contextualising the data. The SA QLFS covers nearly a million jobs in agricultural sectors, including poultry, beef, maize, and fruit farming. To use this study to make specific conclusions about sugar farming is highly misleading.
Additionally, HEALA’s narrow focus on sugar as a cause of serious health problems overlooks the wider range of factors affecting public health, including high stress environments, violence, lack of exercise, excessive intake of fatty foods, malnutrition, and inadequate access to varied diets and protein from sources like meat, beans, and eggs.
Focusing solely on sugar as the cause of many of South Africa’s health problems is an overly simplistic approach that ignores the complexities of nutrition and life in the country.
SA Canegrowers urges HEALA and other stakeholders to engage in a meaningful and fair dialogue that is based on facts.
Issued by Gerhard Mulder on behalf of SA Canegrowers, 21 October 2024
