Heala’s attack on SA Canegrowers contains misinformation and jeopardises small-scale farmers

With its attack on SA Canegrowers in Daily Maverick (“Urgent need to support the Health Promotion Levy and prioritise health over profits”, February 18, 2025), the Healthy Living Alliance’s (Heala) campaign of misinformation has reached its zenith.

Heala’s misinformation starts with its first statement, that the Health Promotion Levy (a sanitised name for the tax on sugar-sweetened beverages) is a “life-saving intervention”. It doesn’t produce any data for this statement, because there is none.

The very accusations that Heala lays on SA Canegrowers can be used to describe Heala’s media campaign over the past year: it is misleading the public with distractions and false information.

A few studies have been done in South Africa since 2018 to assess the impact of the sugar tax, in all cases by the very academic institutions that lobbied for the sugar tax in the first place, such as Priceless SA. This is a notable conflict of interest.

All of the studies were small and limited in scope. None of the studies provided any conclusive data that the sugar tax was addressing obesity or diabetes and none made the claim the sugar tax was lifesaving.

In one of the supportive studies, the researchers found that even though the consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages went down by a small margin among participants after the introduction of the tax, the participants’ body-mass index still increased over the period.

In the Daily Maverick article, researchers cited a study which claims the tax led to a 30% reduction in sugar consumed in taxed drinks. However, what they failed to mention is that according to that study, before the tax, the amount of sugar being consumed in sugar-sweetened beverages averaged three teaspoons a day — already well below various international recommendations of five to nine teaspoons of sugar per day.

This is hardly an amount that required an intervention in the first place and the reduction of a single spoon of sugar a day in taxed beverages cannot be described as lifesaving.

The author of that article missed a very obvious fact: obesity and diabetes are multifactorial diseases. You don’t have to take SA Canegrowers’ word for it. The World Health Organization says that Type 2 diabetes is caused by lifestyle (including being overweight and not getting enough exercise) and underlying genetic factors.

The study showing an increase in weight even with lower sugar-sweetened beverages can be read to support the rational conclusion that the sugar tax is not acting as it was intended.

The SA Revenue Service website says the aim of the tax is “to decrease diabetes, obesity and other related diseases in South Africa”. In the seven years and counting since the introduction of the tax, there is no conclusive proof that it is working as intended.

Sweeping statements

Heala has a pattern of making sweeping statements with no basis in reality. It uses the accounting fraud at Tongaat Hulett to paint the entire sugar value chain as corrupt and profit-obsessed. Tongaat Hulett is a single company in an industry that comprises many farmers, millers, commercial users and more. The sugar industry as a whole supports a million livelihoods — most of these are not connected to Tongaat Hulett.

The fact is that the collapse of Tongaat Hulett created uncertainty and pain for many growers and industry stakeholders, some of whom were already under severe financial pressure. SA Canegrowers represents farmers, who are working under adverse conditions without the added stress of the sugar tax.

What must certainly be Heala’s most callous claim is that increasing the sugar tax will somehow benefit youth feeding schemes. There is no truth to this claim.

The sugar tax is not ring-fenced and the tax income it provides the state does not benefit a single programme. Increasing the sugar tax does not mean an increase in funding for feeding schemes.

In Heala’s latest slickly produced webisode, they interview an unemployed mother in the Northern Cape who relies on feeding schemes for sustenance for her children. Yet again the obvious conclusion escapes Heala’s propaganda: it is unemployment that pushes families into dire situations and severe food insecurity.

The introduction of the sugar tax in 2018 cost 16,000 jobs — again, you don’t have to take SA Canegrowers’ word for it, seek out the independent study done by Nedlac. Any increase or expansion of the sugar tax will again push more growers out of business.

Most of the people that SA Canegrowers represents are small-scale growers in rural KwaZulu-Natal and Mpumalanga. They grow sugar cane not to “prioritise profit” as Heala claims, but to provide food and stability to their families and communities.

In case this is not obvious yet, Heala’s argument is self-defeating: higher taxes will push more growers, especially small-scale growers, out of business and will only worsen the unemployment and food insecurity crises in South Africa.

Lastly, Heala asks for transparency. SA Canegrowers is fully transparent and our funding and intentions are clear. We present the interest of our growers, real South Africans who are the backbone of their communities.

Heala on the other hand is a not-for-profit organisation with opaque US and Swiss donors. In the past year, we estimate that Heala has spent millions of rands on a paid-for campaign of online and television ads, sponsored content in print and online titles, and an expensive web series that has been promoted to millions of views.

A South African farming association like SA Canegrowers does not have the resources to compete with the deep pockets of such foreign-funded lobbying groups. But the fact that the sugar tax destroys jobs and livelihoods is our real and lived experience in the rural heart of South Africa. Transparent, independent third-party studies bear this out. DM

Higgins Mdluli is the chairperson of SA Canegrowers.