The Pan Amer­i­can Health Or­ga­ni­za­tion (PA­HO) says lev­els of health tax­es on al­co­hol and sug­ar sweet­ened bev­er­ages in the Amer­i­c­as re­main too low to sig­nif­i­cant­ly re­duce con­sump­tion and pre­vent non-com­mu­ni­ca­ble dis­eases (NCDs), even as the re­gion records some of the high­est con­sump­tion lev­els in the world.

In its lat­est re­ports, ti­tled “Tax­es on al­co­holic bev­er­ages in the Amer­i­c­as” and “Tax­es on sweet­ened bev­er­ages in the Amer­i­c­as” , show that tax lev­els across the Amer­i­c­as re­main be­low glob­al av­er­ages, lim­it­ing the ef­fec­tive­ness of one of the most cost-ef­fec­tive pub­lic health in­ter­ven­tions avail­able.

For beer, the me­di­an to­tal tax bur­den in the re­gion stands at 25.5 per cent, com­pared to a glob­al me­di­an of 29.4 per cent, while tax­es on spir­its av­er­age 31.5 per cent, be­low the glob­al me­di­an of 38.7 per cent.