Mexico seeks to reduce obesity with junk food tax
Baku, October 30 (AZERTAC). Mexico is turning to its tax system to tackle the highest obesity levels in North America with plans to raise levies on the fatty foods and sugary sodas that contribute to more deaths than drug violence.
The lower house of Congress passed President Enrique Peña Nieto’s fiscal plan on Oct. 17 after adding a 5 percent tax on junk food.
The duty is on top of a 1 peso per-liter tax on soft drinks included in the administration’s original proposal. The bill heads to the full Senate for a vote as early as today after upper house committees approved it this morning.
Mexico is struggling to deal with an adult obesity prevalence of 32.8 percent, the highest among major countries after Egypt and compared with 31.8 percent in the United States, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, or FAO.
The nation is the world’s top consumer of soft drinks at 163 liters per capita a year, 40 percent more than the U.S., according to the World Health Organization, helping make diabetes Mexico’s top killer.
“Diabetes, hypertension and obesity are a significant burden on the nation’s health system, and it’s going to grow in coming years,” Armando Ríos Piter, the Democratic Revolution Party’s member on the Senate Finance Committee, said in a phone interview.
Diabetes cost the lives of about 81,000 Mexicans in 2011, obesity cost the Mexican health system 42 billion pesos ($3.2 billion) in 2008, an amount equivalent to 13 percent of spending on health, according to the National Academy of Medicine.
If current trends hold, that cost would rise to 101 billion pesos in 2017, according to the academy’s estimate.
The proposed soda tax could help prevent 515,000 new cases of diabetes by 2030 and lead to $14 billion in savings for the health system, said Arantxa Colchero, a health economist and researcher at Mexico’s National Institute of Public Health.
The purpose of the soda and junk food taxes is more to encourage healthy habits and fund programs to educate consumers than to raise revenue, Finance Minister Luis Videgaray said in an interview with Radio Formula on Oct.17.
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