Lisbon, Oct. 16, 2024 (Lusa) - Researcher Hilson Cunha e Filho said on Wednesday that not increasing taxes on alcohol and tobacco shows "the total alienation" of those who draw up Portugal's draft state budget from the "really important" health problems.
The public health expert was commenting to the Lusa news agency on a report in the Expresso newspaper according to which the government does not intend to raise taxes on these products in 2025, hoping that the increase in revenue will be due to the expected growth in private consumption.
For the researcher at Universidade Nova's Interdisciplinary Centre for Social Sciences, the proposed draft state budget ‘misinterprets’ consumption tax, which is meant to regulate and inhibit consumption and not ‘as a way of raising revenue’.
But what is written is that the government has "an expectation that consumption will increase and thus increase revenue, stimulating the economy to increase consumption of these products in society".
In his opinion, this is "an extremely poor vision of what the state budget for finance is", commenting that "trying to stimulate the economy and consumption so that people drink more, smoke more and have more revenue is bordering on the absurd".
Having studied addictions and their impacts for decades, the researcher warned that the taxes levied on these products "will never be able to cover the costs of illness, accidents, social and labour losses that this consumption causes".
The researcher questioned the fact that the authors of the draft state budget want to stimulate and increase alcohol consumption when Portugal is already one of the countries in the world with the highest levels of per capita consumption per year (12.1 litres) and has worrying levels of deaths from alcohol-related driving and cancers associated with alcohol consumption, such as those of the digestive system or the breast.
He also noted that all the chronic non-communicable diseases that have alcohol, tobacco and diet as their main risk factors, in addition to the suffering caused, put a strain on the national health service (SNS) and its sustainability.
For Hilson Cunha e Filho, the government should be concerned about the sustainability of the SNS, "trying to collect from these globalised companies, which dominate the alcohol or tobacco market, a kind of compensation for the damage caused to the public", but "this is not exactly what it has in mind".
He regretted that whenever taxes are raised on these products, it is to increase revenue and balance the state budget and "never because there is a health strategy behind it to reduce the public's consumption and thus reduce the problems".
"There is a lot of concern about how they are going to manage and sustain the SNS, but a health policy that is truly respected by all the other ministries and by the government doesn't exist," lamented the head of the Portuguese Confederation for the Prevention of Smoking, which sits on the National Alcohol and Health Forum.
The researcher called for the parties to dedicate themselves to correcting the Excise Duty in order to create incentives for healthier consumer choices and behaviour, as well as introducing other policy measures to improve the health of the Portuguese instead of only worrying about treating the damage and consequent illnesses afterwards.
He gave the example that in some places an alcoholic drink is cheaper than a bottle of water, arguing: "If the minimum price of an alcoholic drink were higher, the consumer's choice would tend towards continuing to drink, but water rather than alcohol".
"Therefore, they wouldn't choose not to consume anything, so the impact on the economy would tend to be very small or even nil. The same goes for drinks with too much sugar. This is the logic of the market and it should be seen by the Treasury," he argued.
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