I HAVE a list of the items removed from the basket of goods that previously did not attract the value added tax (VAT). In other words, these items are now subject to 17.5 per cent VAT.
When compounded at retail, the effect of this VAT will result in anywhere from 22 to 25 per cent price increase on the items depending on their category. The cost of food will therefore rise.
To have used the tariff headings in a blanket form was a mistake. How did Government do its homework? Government could hardly have intended to raise the cost of all of the following food items:
Tariff and description
19.01 – Food preparation of flour, groats, meal, starch or malt extract not containing cocoa, or containing less than 40 per cent of weight of cocoa calculated on a totally defatted basis;
15.15 – Other fixed vegetable fats and oils. Maize (corn) oil and its fraction;
15.07 – Soya bean oil and its fractions;
10.06 – Rice;
10.06.40.00 – Broken rice;
10.06.10.00 – Rice in husk;
8.1 – Other fruit, fresh. Golden apples;
8.07 – Melons (including watermelons and paw paw (papayas), fresh;
7.1 – Vegetables (uncooked or cooked by steaming or boiling in water), frozen;
7.10.80.00 – Other vegetables;
7.10.40.00 – Sweet corn;
07.10.30.00 – Spinach, New Zealand spinach and orache spinach (garden spinach);
Leguminous vegetables, shelled or unshelled;
7.10.22.00 – Beans;
7.10.21.00 – Peas;
7.09 – Other vegetables, fresh or chilled;
7.01 – Potatoes, fresh or chilled;
4.06 – Cheese and curd;
305 – Fish dried, salt or in brine, smoked fish whether or not cooked before or during the smoking process;
3.04 – Fish fillets and other fish meat (whether or not minced), fresh, chilled or frozen; flying fish;
3.03 – Fish, frozen excluding fish fillets and other fish meat of heading 3.04;
03.03.78.00 – Hake;
03.03.74.00 – Mackerel;
3.03.71.00 – Sardines;
3.03.60.00 – Cod, excluding livers and roes;
3.03.50.00-3031100000 – Herrings excluding livers and roes, yellow fin tunas, Albacore, Sole, Halibut, Atlantic salmon, Trout, Sockeye salmon;
3.02 – Fish, fresh or chilled excluding fish fillet or other fish meat of heading 03.04;
3026920900 – Snapper, croacker, grouper, bangamary and sea trout;
3026500000 – Dog fish and other sharks;
2.1 – Meat and edible meat offal, salted in brine, dried or smoked, edible flours, and meals of meat or meat offal;
2.02 – Meat of bovine animals, frozen; boneless;
2023020000 – Sirloin;
2023010000 – Tenderloin; other cuts with bone in;
2.01 – Meat of bovine animals, fresh or chilled; boneless;
2013030000 – Minced (ground) meat;
2013020000 – Sirloin
2013010000 – Tenderloin
2.03 – Meat of swine, fresh, chilled or frozen.
I repeat that if the modus operandi is that only rich people eat certain foods and, conversely, that poor people should not enjoy strawberries, snapper, smoked salmon, mackerel, cashew nuts, sweet corn, brussel sprouts, T-bone steak, ground minced meat, or buy broken rice to feed their pet dog, then the thinking in this country is firmly fixed in the 1930s.
The extraction by Government of $20 million from this group of items will have a first impact of an increase of approximately $25 million from the shoppers’ pockets – rich or poor.
The country needs budgetary proposals that are more imaginative than this.
– Andrew Bynoe
