Germany considers 19% meat tax to combat global warming as poverty threatens 1 in 5
Germany lawmakers are entertaining the notion of a steep increase to the taxation on meat to allegedly curb the impact on the environment, combat climate and global warming, while “strengthening animal welfare.”
“I am in favour of abolishing the VAT reduction for meat and earmarking it for more animal welfare,” Friedrich Ostendorf, agricultural policy spokesperson for the Greens told The Local website.
He said it mad “no sense” that meat was taxed at seven percent while oat milk is taxed at 19 percent, citing the current meat tax for Germans.
The increase was originally put forward by Germany’s Animal Welfare Association. “Parallel to the CO2 tax, we also need a meat tax,” its president Thomas Schröder said, pointing out that meat, milk and eggs only cost “a few cents” per kilo.
In its 2016 climate protection plan, Germany ‘grand coalition’ (Chancellor Angela Merke Democrats and the Social Democrats) agreed in targets for the agricultural sector: by 2030, emissions should fall by 31 to 34 percent compared with 1990 levels.
Rainer Spiering, the SPD’s agricultural policy spokesman, also felt that a meat tax could reduce consumption but that “it would mostly affect consumers,” rather than leading to a shift in standards in the meat industry.
The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) says the livestock sector produces 14.5% of greenhouse gas emissions, or 7.1 gigatonnes of CO2 equivalent – more than all the direct emissions from cars, aviation, ships and other transport.
While the widespread perspective is that Germans are wealthy, a prosperous nation, poverty has grown in Germany. According to a DW article in 2018, around 20% of Germans are struggling to pay their bills and heat their homes. What will this new meat tax do to this population of Germans?
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