The question was first asked a quarter of a century before English-sailors landed in Barbados in 1627 and took possession of the island in the name of the Crown.
“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose, by any name would smell as sweet,” asked Juliet about Romeo’s name in William Shakespeare’s popular romantic play Romeo And Juliet.
That scene came to mind the other day when the Economist published its annual data book, Pocket World In Figures 2017. Barbados was ranked among the top 20 nations with the world’s highest rates of obesity.
With almost 40 per cent of adult women and 30 per cent of men classified as being obese two years ago, Barbados found itself in the company of Qatar, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Fiji, The Bahamas, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Oman, Trinidad and Tobago, Jordan, Andorra, Turkey, New Zealand, Australia and Mexico.
And Barbados was on another list: those states which have turned to taxes to address what’s really a global health epidemic: obesity. That’s where Shakespeare comes in.
For the countries are using a variety of names – sugary beverage, “sin soda”, sugar-laden carbonated drink, liquid candy and Pigovian – to describe the taxes they have either imposed or are planning to as part of a strategy to reduce obesity. Those places run the gamut from Australia, Fiji, Norway, Mauritius, Samoa, Chile, Ireland and the United Kingdom to Hungary, Nauru, Samoa, St Helena, French Polynesia and the United States. What’s puzzling about the tax is whether it is really lowering sugary drink consumption and cutting the rate of Type 2 diabetes.
Few places, Barbados included, have scientifically studied the impact of the taxes on consumers. Mexico has done so and likes what it has seen. According to a survey, soda sales in the Central American nation dropped by six per cent in 2014 after the tax was imposed. However, the rate of decline slowed last year. Chile, the country with one of the world’s highest per capita soda consumption rates didn’t match Mexico’s performance.
The problem for governments is the need to balance health concerns with worries about jobs. That’s because soft drink manufacturers are fighting back against the tax by spending huge sums, insisting that the tax hasn’t lowered obesity rates in any part of the world but it can cost places much-needed jobs.
Take the case of Ireland. When Michael Noonan, the Minister for Finance, announced that he was planning to impose a tax on sugary drinks, the Irish Beverage Council charged that there wasn’t any credible scientific evidence to support the effectiveness of the tax in cutting obesity. Indeed, the Council insisted there was a “100 per cent [international] failure rate of sugar tax directed at tackling obesity”.
The trouble is that as more countries consider soda taxes the global soft drink market is recording explosive growth rates. For instance, in India, the market’s retail value more than doubled in five years. Indonesia and the Philippines have also seen the demand skyrocket, 45 per cent in Indonesia and 30 per cent in the Philippines.
Little wonder that industry executives expect the global market to surpass the US$600 billion mark this year, with the US accounting for almost 20 per cent of consumption in value terms, according to published reports.
The American Beverage Association, a powerful industry group, says it isn’t buying the link between obesity rates and the imposition of, or a steep jump in, existing “sin” taxes.
It argues the tax sends the “wrong message” to consumers.
That brings the issue of jobs onto the front burner.
When Vietnam let it be known that it was considering a ten per cent tax on sodas, the country changed its mind after manufacturers heightened the pressure on the government citing a possible loss of jobs.
Three years ago, Denmark abandoned a ten-year-old soda tax after it became convinced that it needed the jobs which were being threatened by the tax.
And in New York, former Mayor Michael Bloomberg proposed placing a limit on sugary drinks in the city in 2012, but the manufacturers and other critics went to court and won their case, forcing the mayor to back off.
However, Bloomberg hasn’t given up the fight.
The billionaire businessman pumped US$20 million into a campaign that favoured the tax in California’s Bay area. The upshot: voters in San Francisco, Oakland and Albany approved ballot proposals demanding the imposition of a soda tax. Voters did the same thing in Cook County and Chicago in Illinois.
With Berkley in California and Philadelphia already using a soda tax, ten communities in the US now have the measure.
But the story doesn’t end there. Soda manufacturers in different parts of the world have something else to worry about: the attitude of the World Health Organisation (WHO) to which Barbados and its neighbours belong. WHO has entered the fray on the side of Barbados, Hungary, Chile and the other places with the tax.
It has called on its members to impose it in order to lower obesity rates.
“If governments tax products like sugar drinks, they can reduce suffering and save lives,” said Dr Douglas Bettcher, head of the WHO’s Department for the Prevention of Non-Communicable Diseases. “They can also cut health care costs.”
So when the Freundel Stuart administration reviews the effectiveness of its soda tax, it must decide if it should raise or discard it.
If the Government asked international health experts for advice, they would probably say to raise the tax in order to make it more difficult for children, especially poor youngsters to buy the drinks. The experts would insist the fight against obesity in children and adults needs additional ammunition to be successful.
After all, soft drinks contribute to obesity which in turn causes heart disease, diabetes and tooth decay.
Globally, an estimated 42 million children under the age of five years were either overweight or obese in 2015, an increase of 11 million in more than a decade.
Forty five per cent of them were in Asia and 25 per cent in Africa.