FLASH
Shkruar nga Irena Beqiraj
How can we help farmers from the ignorance of the government elected by them?
Many people in the corridors of political decision-making consider taxation to be a means of securing budget revenues, and when drafting policies, they take care to maximize budget revenues and minimize informality.
No, taxation is the instrument or one of the most important economic policies in the hands of the government, and as such its primary objective is to influence the behavior and decision-making of people in certain markets. Taxation incentivizes or discourages certain behaviors in a market, and even the risks or benefits created through it influence people's decisions to enter or leave certain markets.
Taxing farmers in these 12 years has been the product par excellence of lobbying by certain groups close to the government.
Neither the solutions recommended over the years by technical staff nor Erion Braçe's insistence have been able to change its irrationality. Ironically, every time it has been revised, it has gotten worse.
I'm not going into technical details, but a fair and incentivizing scheme that does not harm small farms but helps the merger and creation of large farms would need to contain:
1. 0% VAT on agricultural raw materials
2. VAT 0 on agricultural machinery.
3. Abolition of the VAT auto-invoicing scheme, either full or reduced, for collectors when purchasing from small farms (since the first two conditions exempt small farms from VAT on purchases).
4. Application of VAT to products of large farms.
5. Refund of a portion of the VAT invoiced by large farms, in the form of subsidies based on the VAT invoiced. (this would encourage the farm to join but also to invoice with VAT).
Experience has shown that every other option tried has resulted in a stunt that does not help the farmer and contributes to the further fragmentation of agriculture rather than the creation of economies of scale, despite being packaged and sold to the public by the government as a brilliant solution.
The fact that the agricultural sector is no longer in recession but has fallen into a full and severe depression after 13 consecutive quarters of decline shows that the economic policies designed, including taxation, have forced people to abandon this vital sector for the economy and the country.
The agricultural sector is not regulated by changing NFA inspectors, nor by confiscating products and imposing fines on the few people who have decided to still operate in this difficult and abusive market.
Because informality is not the cause but the consequence of a market that is deregulated and abused by the uninformed policies of socialist governments, which, with the vote of farmers, will continue to draft policies for these 4 years.
How can we help farmers from the ignorance of the government elected by them?
Lini një Përgjigje