Despite declines in smoking in developing nations, getting people hooked on nicotine remains a hugely profitable business for Big Tobacco, which reaped at least $44 billion in profits in 2013. With the decline in smoking in developing nations, Big Tobacco naturally turned its attentions to poorer, developing nations to peddle their cigarettes. (In developed nations, they are mainly trying to hook kids with candy-flavored nicotine gum, smokeless tobacco and the various vape devices.)
So it is encouraging news indeed to hear that health-minded philanthropists Bill Gates and Michael Bloomberg are establishing a fund to help developing countries fight back against the hugely expensive legal battles that Big Tobacco is known to wage. The anti-tobacco trade litigation fund, established by Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Bill &Melinda Gates Foundation, said countries with limited resources should not be bullied into making bad health policy choices. For example, they said, Uruguay has been fighting a legal challenge by Philip Morris International since 2010 against the use of graphic health warnings on tobacco products.
The fund will help nations challenge the tobacco industry’s use of international trade agreements to threaten and prevent countries from passing tobacco control, Bloomberg said. “This is about sovereignty and whether a country has the right to set its own public health policies,” he said.
Unfortunately, China is not one of the countries trying to reduce tobacco use, which erases gains made elsewhere. The health campaign group World Lung Foundation reported this week that in 2014, more than 5.8 trillion cigarettes were smoked, similar to 2013, as rising tobacco use in China counters declines in other countries.
“The significant reductions in smoking rates in the United Kingdom, Australia, Brazil and other countries that implement increasingly tight tobacco control laws have been offset by the growing consumption in a single nation: China,” the WLF report said.
The group reports that globally, 6.3 million people died from smoking-related illness in 2014, and if the current trends continue, a billion people will die from smoking and exposure to tobacco this century.
Trying to reduce the rates in China is particularly challenging, the International Business Times reported, “because a state-owned agency called the Chinese National Tobacco Co. profits from tobacco production and is also in charge of regulating the industry.” This arrangement means that the government benefits from the country’s estimated 300 million smokers, who account for 1 in 3 smokers worldwide.
Perhaps after the anti-tobacco litigation fund gets underway, philanthropists can establish a fund specifically to convince China to see the human (and eventual economic) value in getting out of the tobacco business.
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