Sodium reduction
Sodium taxes: Worth their salt, or salt in the wound?
For years, governments and pundits have argued about the rights and wrongs of salt taxes. For supporters, slapping levies on salty snacks is a simple matter of public health. For opponents, punishing people for what they eat is the epitome of an overbearing nanny state. But, behind the politics, what is the actual efficacy of salt taxes? Isabel Ellis asks Franco Sassi, professor of international health policy and economics at Imperial College London.
I
t is not hard to see why contemporary governments might be wary of taxing salt. Historically, it has not done much for anyone’s popularity – quite the opposite. The story of the political system that legitimises most of them is tied up in rejecting the practice. The burden France’s hated gabelle put on the country’s poorest inhabitants helped cause the 1789 French revolution.
As Professor Franco Sassi, director of the Centre for Health Economics and Policy Innovation at Imperial College London, puts it: “Taxation is a very powerful incentive for getting people to change their behaviour.” He is talking specifically about modern consumption choices, but the impacts of historical salt levies prove the same point.
Less than a century ago, one turned the simple process of evaporating sea water into the first act in “a holy war” to “[shake] the foundations of ... empire”. Those are quotes from Mohandas Gandhi, who explicitly used Britain’s exploitative colonial regime of salt taxes in India as a motivator and structuring principle for the country’s independence movement. His 1930 Salt March launched a mass campaign of civil disobedience across India. Brutal reprisals by colonial forces led Vithalbhai Patel, former speaker of India’s Central Legislative Assembly, to remark that, “All hope of reconciling India with the British Empire is lost forever.” For Gandhi, who became Time magazine’s ‘Man of the Year’ for 1930, salt was an obvious protest focus. Abstract demands for rights were difficult to
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understand and potentially divisive, but sodium keeps people alive, no matter their creed. “Next to air and water,” he told some of his more sceptical comrades, “salt is perhaps the greatest necessity of life.” Specifically, the sodium in salt is involved in a range of vital functions, from regulating the body’s fluid balance to transmitting signals through the nervous system. Salt starvation, of the sort that plagued India through its time as a UK colony, causes brain cells to swell, with symptoms ranging from confusion and personality changes to seizures, coma and death.
The somewhat grisly truth is that humanity’s ubiquitous need for salt is also what has made it such an irresistible source of government revenues. After operating for more than 2,000 years, the Chinese government’s salt monopoly – the model for all other salt taxes – only ended in 2016. For much of China’s history, the proceeds from salt taxes were as essential to the functioning of the state as salt was to the health of its people – covering the cost of defence projects like the original Great Wall of China and, at times, totalling more than half of government income. But just as the last of the world’s governments seem to have got over their salt tax addictions, their salt-addicted citizens have given them a whole new reason to indulge. According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), most people now consume 9–12g of salt per day, or around twice the recommended maximum intake. In doing so, they risk increasing their blood pressure, which can lead
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