Calls for Zuma to push for Robin Hood tax at G20
The European Union has in recent months come increasingly closer to implementing a financial transaction tax (FTT), the G20 will meet this week to among others discuss the FTT with Bill Gates set to release a report detailing the feasibility of an FTT.
Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) and the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) have pointed out that as the only African country in the G20, South Africa had a role to play in ensuring that a portion of the FTT went to health and not bailing out banks.
The FTT is not another tax on working people, but on financial institutions only ‘ it could cover any financial transaction between banks or be more specific and cover currency exchanges between banks.
A tax implemented on just a European level would bring in an estimated ‘¬57 billion or US$81 billion per year. If G20 countries also implemented a tax, it would reap tens of billions of dollars more. Even a portion of that sum would be a significant boost to tackling global health crises ‘ according to the World Health Organisation, just an extra U$1.5 billion is needed to properly prevent, diagnose and treat tuberculosis in 2012, for example.
Funds could also serve to prevent a child from becoming severely malnourished; to protect children from deadly measles outbreaks; to prevent a baby from acquiring HIV at birth; to get people on life-saving tuberculosis treatment sooner; or to save lives while dramatically reducing the spread of HIV through treatment.
‘With governments scaling back foreign aid, there is no excuse not to allocate part of the funds raised from a financial transaction tax to health needs in developing countries,’ said Sharonann Lynch, HIV/AIDS Policy Advisor for MSF’s Access Campaign. ‘A financial transaction tax would give us the predictable and sustainable funding source that is needed now more than ever.’
MSF’s report 5 Lives reveals that U$35 will buy 10 sachets of ready-to-use supplementary food for malnourished children, while U$150 a year can buy life-saving anti-retroviral medicines that can keep a person with HIV alive.
‘We’ve seen through our work how key health interventions can change lives as well as the trajectory of pressing health needs,’ said Dr Tido von Schoen-Angerer, Executive Director at MSF’s Access Campaign. ‘It’s time global health got its bailout.’
The idea of an FTT is gaining political traction at the very moment global health is showing the strains of reduced funding. Funding for HIV, for example, fell for the first time in 2009, and again in 2010. The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria was forced to skip a year of grants for the first time in its history because of a severe financial shortfall. Funds from an FTT could help bridge the gap between what is needed and what has actually been given – and thus help countries diagnose more patients with TB, switch to better malaria protocols, or put more patients on HIV treatment.
Recent research shows that HIV treatment can also help prevent new infections. UNAIDS predicts that 7 million lives would be saved and 12 million new infections prevented by 2020 if treatment is dramatically expanded now.
‘There are funding gaps across global health that could be plugged with money from a financial transaction tax,’ said Lynch. ‘It’s time to invest in real lives ‘ real futures.’
South Africa already has its own version of FTT, called a Securities Transfer Tax in which .25 percent is taxed on any exchange in securities. In 2010 this tax raised R3.32-billion.
Civil society groups have proposed that South Africa uses a portion of the billions raised annually through the Securities Transfer Tax for health financing.
President Jacob Zuma will attend the G20 in Cannes from today (Thursday).
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