Despite a tax on sugary sodas, there are no plans to implement a salt tax, Deputy Chief Medical Officer Dr Arthur Phillips said Thursday.
The medical official made the announcement to reporters following the donation of medical equipment from the Shaw Centre for Pediatric Excellence – a partnership between the government and Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) – to the Frederick ‘Freddie’ Miller Polyclinic at The Glebe, St George.
While acknowledging that salt intake is a crucial contributor to high blood pressure and other chronic diseases, he said current research on taxing salt would have little discernible effect.
“In terms of the salt tax, this is something that was raised as a potential consideration, and the Ministry of Health was asked to submit documentation in terms of our position and recommendations and we have done so. In short, our view is that there is limited evidence of the potential effectiveness of a salt tax in our current setting and that the approach to dealing with excessive consumption of salt needs to be holistic. Dealing with public awareness, dealing with availability, those are the sort of drivers that we would want to focus on in terms of reducing consumption in Barbados.
“We feel that a salt tax would not have a major role to play in dealing with salt consumption in Barbados at this time, and that’s what we have indicated,” the deputy CMO said.
He said the 20 per cent excise tax on sugary drinks, which has been attributed to a decline in the sales of sodas, was different from any possible salt tax, given the number of products that can easily be found to contain added sugar.
Dr Phillips said: “With sugar-sweetened beverages, you have a defined set of products that are relatively easy to identify and to tax in terms of their tariff codes for importation. Salt is co-consumed in products, it’s a very cheap item, and so it presents itself in a wide variety of areas, and the literature unfortunately around salt tax has not indicated that it is an easy intervention to design and implement and that it is effective as a measure for reducing salt consumption.”
He added that stakeholders were still looking into the possibility of using the revenue collected from the sugar tax, to help offset prices on healthier options.
“There has been some specific work done with the Sweetened Beverage Committee and with colleagues from UWI [University of the West Indies], looking at potential cross-subsidies, potentially using some of the revenue generated by the sugar-sweetened beverage tax to then further assist in making healthier items of food more affordable,” Dr Phillips said. (SB)
