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Paper needs LAND and Paper products form an interesting discussion around tax. Most of SA's tax is from VAT, formerly GST as well as feul tax and levies as well as income tax.
1. VAT on textbooks is a form of capital generation by the government, although a book itself is a finished product, large capital flow goes into the beneficiation of paper from timber.
2. Paper is obviously still made from wood, JSE listed companies Sappi and Mondi Rotatrim, Typek all need vast tractions of land or deals with farmers or other related timber companies which often leads to deforestation (destroying the ecological base of South African fauna with plantations and monoculture)
3. Some of these companies lie and say they use coated, woodfree paper, whatever that means. It is a lie.
4. Universities and schools are amongst the largest consumers of paper and pulp products everywhere, possibly the biggest of them all. This ranges from books to textbooks, cardboard, pulp, toilet tissue etc. Brands like Twinsaver, Kleenex, Baby Soft are all branches of the large conglomerates involved in the paper and pulp making industry, which all use wood found on LAND as a raw material.
USA, Great Britain, Canada, Sweden, Finland, Russia, Korea, China are amongst the scavengers of African forests for the paper and pulp industry.
A very good case was recently made against VAT in textbooks, considering the above this is nowhere near enough! The issue should be further unpacked to look at plantation ownership rather than just "employment opportunities" offered since plantations take up over 1% of our total land, which is massive when you consider how much Karoo and highveld wilderness remains unused or undeveloped or protected. In terms of land use, the afforested area is about 1,27 million ha or about 1% of the total South African land area of 122,3 million ha.
This opens a Pandora's box which I will get to in future posts.I have many reservations that any meaningful land reform will ever come from purely race-based politics which feed the divide and rule agenda, even though most of the land historically recently has been in "white" hands, by perpetuating the above nothing will change except some blacks will be empowered. However, this only applies if your idea of empowerment is the rich black CEO's, upper management and shareholders that South Africas "Employment Equity" laws guaranteed placement. This especially applies to these multinational companies and equally corrupt sub-contractors and vendors. In real-world terms, no opportunity exists on the land of the forefathers of the black majority for their descendants even years after the colonial rule was supposedly ended. Racial employment laws and other factors also are sending "previously advantaged" whites packing if the emigration stats are anything to go by.
Racial issues exist as inextricably linked to land issues in South Africa but the local approach to them, just like everywhere in the world is divide and conquer/ divide and rule.
If history teaches us anything (real history not fake history) is that we should not support top-down initiatives masking such tactics unless you are a ruling elite who would then benefit. Are you a ruler? Will you benefit?
These multinationals own much of the land their plantations are on, rather than "White farmers" we are dealing with clever shareholder arrangments, JSE arrangments and political bureaucracy that leads to all the usual suspects.
https://www.sappi.com/sappi-forests
https://ejatlas.org/conflict/mondi-and-sappi-plantations-in-zululand-south-africa
https://fulldisclosure.cer.org.za/2015/paper-pulp/licences
The issue is not just land but the paper itself and this extends to education.
1. SA Reserve Bank has a duty to regulate rates which determine prices at which goods are sold.
2. SARS has a duty to collect revenue from these monstrous Multi-National companies which manufacture paper. But how many billions does Sappi have offshore? which if were progressively taxed would fund the education of thousands of students?
3. The National Treasury, Finance Minister and SARS also have a duty in making sure that all textbook selling stores in South Africa don't engage in price fixing or hike the price due to opportunistic political development.
After all, why should the students pay so much money while Multi-National companies, especially those profiting off our land, are allowed to shift profit to offshore havens without them declaring profits?
If anyone wants their land back or at least reasonably priced back in the public domain for entrepreneurs and taxpayers rather than rebate thieving offshore multinationals, start with the paper industry and follow the path to free government education.
Paper leads to business and education... but also to land and taxation. This is how to frame the issue in your mind. Now, what if I told you every other industry follows a similar path? Don't believe me? Stay tuned for upcoming posts on SA Land & Taxes for more of this
As a side note on the education thread that I'd like to tie up, It is critical that the core syllabus never be handled in privatised capacity. This should always be a taxpayer-funded function that must be improved from that sphere rather than privatising. The reasons for this are clear and abandoning expectation for government improvements and allowing faceless, shadowy corporate agendas to steer the ship can only end in tears.
Continued at: https://dwahts.blogspot.com/2019/06/south-africa-land-and-taxes-part-2.html
Homepage: https://dwahts.blogspot.com