EVEN before the Department of Health could draft and formally present its proposal to tax salty food, including dried fish, leaders of the House of Representatives have thumbed down the DOH’s plan, calling it inflationary.
While the House recognizes the warnings of the DOH and World Health Organization concerning the adverse impact of high salt content on human health, House Committee on Ways and Means Joey Sarte Salceda said lawmakers are concerned that this will constitute a tax on the entire food item.
“Take the highest level of care when it comes to taxing food especially when we are targeting specific items like sugar and salt, which are only one of many ingredients of which are beneficial to health,” said Salceda.
Amid the supply problems caused by African swine fever, a highly contagious hog disease, the lawmaker also said the salt tax could jack up the prices of processed meat products.
Salceda said the House would rather tax junk food. All tax measures emanate from the House of Representatives.
“At this point, while the House Committee on Ways and Means is primordially averse to any tax on food. It will examine instead a junk food tax since the consumptive logic of such eating habit is more obvious and pernicious to a most vulnerable population segment—our young people,” he said.
“There is a world of difference between alcohol and cigarettes versus sugar and salt,” Salceda added.
The lawmaker also reminded the DOH that it cannot pass the ball of health outcomes to tax policy when it has yet to demonstrate and executive affirmative action on health issues, such as polio, dengue, and other diseases.
“The Committee on Ways and Means reiterates its message to the DOH that the House has worked resolutely to fund the Universal Health Care program and would be less charitable to any partial rollout,” said Salceda.
“The House Committee on Ways and Means has been fastidiously studious and diligent in employing taxation as a tool of state policy to achieve national goals beyond generating revenues toward rewarding good investments, providing social benefits to seniors and PWDs, and punishing dysfunctional consumption,” he said.
‘Definitely anti-poor’
Also, House Minority Leader and Bayan Muna Rep. Carlos Isagani Zarate strongly objected to the proposal to impose an excise tax on processed products with salt, saying it would jack up the prices of products like dried fish, sardines and noodles to hundreds of pesos.
“This proposal is ‘definitely anti-poor’ and must be opposed. It is not the sin of the poor that they can only afford a poor people’s diet. It is their concrete present abject condition in our country that prevents them from getting healthy food,” said Zarate.
“It is tragically ironic that the government wants to tax more the poor but it rushed the passage of the bill in Congress that would lower the income tax rate of corporations and the rich,” he added.
During the 17th Congress, the House had considered the proposals imposing “sin” taxes on salty products. The House Ways and Means Committee filed House Bill (HB) 3179 in 2016, which sought to impose an excise of P1 on every milligram of sodium in excess of one- third of the allowable daily intake of sodium chloride as prescribed by the DOH.
The Food and Nutrition Research Institute (FNRI) of the Department of Science and Technology (DOST) backed the proposal, saying moderate consumption of sodium is needed.
It said salt is about 40 percent sodium. A teaspoon of salt (about 5 grams) contains about 2 grams of sodium, which is the recommended amount to be consumed in a day by a healthy adult.
A significant number of countries have already imposed sin taxes on salt to deter people from consuming it. Among them are Vietnam, Uganda, Tanzania, Suriname, Sri Lanka, Panama, Morocco, Kenya, Jordan and Cambodia.