World

Oxfam calls for surprise tax on food companies

LONDON –

The anti-poverty organization Oxfam said on Monday as the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting gets underway, food companies that make a lot of money from rising inflation face real estate taxes. expected to help reduce global inequality.

That’s among the ideas in a report by Oxfam International, which has sought to highlight inequality for a decade at a conference of political and business elites at the Davos ski resort of Switzerland.

The report, aimed at igniting discussions on seminars featuring corporate and government leaders this week, says the world has been beset by simultaneous crises, including Climate change, rising cost of living, Russia’s war in Ukraine and the COVID-19 pandemic, yet the world’s richest people are getting richer and corporate profits are rising.

Over the past two years, 1% of the world’s super-rich have earned almost twice as much wealth as the other 99% combined, Oxfam says. Meanwhile, at least 1.7 billion workers live in countries where inflation is outpacing their wage growth, even as billionaires’ fortunes are growing by $2.7 billion a day.

To address these issues, Oxfam calls for an increase in taxes on the rich, through a combination of measures including a one-time “binding” tax and an increase in the minimum tax rate for the richest. The group noted that billionaire Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s actual tax rate from 2014 to 2018 was just over 3%.

Some governments have moved to tax the profits of fossil fuel companies as Russia’s war in Ukraine sent oil and natural gas prices soaring last year, tightening household finances. families around the world.

Oxfam wants the idea to go further to include large food corporations, as a way to bridge the widening gap between the rich and the poor.

“The number of billionaires is increasing and they are getting richer, and at the same time very large food and energy companies are making too much profit,” said Gabriela Bucher, chief executive officer of Oxfam International.

“What we’re calling for is a surprise tax, not just on energy companies but also on food companies to end profiteering,” Bucher told The Associated Press in an interview. this crisis.

The Oxfam report says wealthy corporations are using war as an excuse to raise prices even bigger. Food and energy is one of those industries dominated by a small number of players with effective monopolies, and the lack of competition allows them to keep prices high, the group said.

At least one country has acted. Portugal has imposed a surprise tax on both energy companies and large food retailers, including supermarket chains and hypermarkets. It went into effect in early January and will be in effect for the whole of 2023.

A tax rate of 33% is applied to profits that are at least 20% higher than the average for the previous 4 years. The increased revenue is used for welfare programs and helping small food retailers.

Oxfam says its analysis of 95 companies with excess margins, or sky-high returns, shows that 84% of those profits are paid out to shareholders while the higher prices are passed on to consumers.

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AP reporter Barry Hatton in Lisbon, Portugal, contributed to this report.



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