Delegates in the House of Peoples of the Parliament of Bosnia and Herzegovina, with 13 votes in favor, unanimously adopted the Draft Law on Amendments to the Law on Value Added Tax, which abolished VAT on donated food. The House of Representatives also did this earlier. We would like to remind you that a large number of companies in Bosnia and Herzegovina, which are involved in the production or trade of food products, were for years discouraged from donating food in larger quantities precisely because of the additional financial obligation to pay VAT.
Large quantities of food are destroyed instead of providing a meal for vulnerable categories of the population. The proposed law specifies that the Management Board of the Indirect Taxation Authority is obliged, within 60 days from the date of entry into force of this law, to pass a by-law for its implementation. SDP MP in the House of Representatives, who is one of the proponents of this legal solution, Saša Magazinović, said that this law is a human, not a political issue, because food in the amount of 130 million marks is thrown away in BiH every year, precisely because of its existence VAT that is also paid on donations to public kitchens. The manager of the National Kitchen in Stari Grad Sarajevo, Amir Radeljaš, says that this kitchen alone currently has 638 users:
“And this way, thank God, VAT will be abolished and all kitchens will benefit from the donated goods. In today’s time, everything has gone, become more expensive, inflation. The war is on in Ukraine. It has been raining for a month and a half lately. So, all these crops, everything was destroyed. All this affects our life. Standard of living. And that food – it is better to distribute it to the kitchens, to use it in an adequate way, to distribute it to those people who have exercised their rights to that hot meal, than to destroy it and throw it away.”
Translated into the amount of food per day, more than 700 thousand meals are wasted. From an economic point of view, any company that annually donates a million marks of food is “punished” with a tax of 170 thousand on the food it donates. Saliha Rokša, PR of the organization Pomozi.ba, also expressed her satisfaction with the adoption of this law: “Here, only as part of the Project ‘Food for all, more than a thousand meals a day’, not to mention our other current projects, such as monthly packages where we deliver packages with food and hygiene products to socially vulnerable families on a monthly basis. So I’m really glad that this law was adopted and that, finally, we will be able to more easily receive donations that these companies would otherwise throw away, and it’s really sad that so much food is wasted while, on the other hand, we have so many poor and hungry people who are barely surviving and who live on the poverty line.”
The proposers of the law worked in cooperation with the Administration for Indirect Taxation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and this law also fulfills the international obligation from the sustainable development goals of the United Nations, which foresees a 50 percent reduction in wasted food by 2030.
