Tobacco.org

• Five nonsmokers’ paradises: a guide for globe-trotters  

The world's biggest tobacco-consuming countries that I profiled in my last post, including Greece, Russia and Austria, are also among the top travel spots, but the opposite isn't quite the case.

Countries with the lowest reported adult smokers, as you'll notice in the list below, don't all provide dream vacations. . . .

1. Ethiopia: This very well might be the first time that this landlocked African country was listed at the top of a travel guide. Just 4.3% of Ethiopians are tobacco users. . . .

2. Ghana: Adult tobacco use in this African country is at 5.5%. . . .

3. Republic of Congo: . . .

4. Nigeria: . . .

5. Cameroon: Nigeria's neighbor to the east has a similar proportion of smokers, at 7.4%.

If you'd prefer a trip outside of Africa, the United Arab Emirates is at No. 22 and Fiji is at No. 23 on the list.. Further down the list, Ecuador is at No. 28, Egypt at No. 33 and the Dominican Republic at No. 35.

Between Egypt and Ecuador is Jamaica

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• Cheap tobacco driving youth to become smokers 

Lebanese health experts calling for a comprehensive smoking ban have been given additional impetus to their cause after a major international public affairs magazine published a major study warning youth smoking rates were increasing dangerously. In a report published earlier this month by the Economist Intelligence Unit with sponsorship from international pharmaceutical company Pfizer, researchers warned that cheap and easily accessible tobacco was driving Lebanon's youth to take up smoking, a habit many will continue into adulthood.

The 28-page report, entitled "Tomorrow's regular customers? Stamping out tobacco use in the Middle East and Africa," also noted that while many countries were now introducing smoking bans in public places, the developing world was seeing a steady increase in smokers, accounting for some 70 percent of the world's total smokers in 2005, compared to about 40 percent in 1970.

The developing world will thus pay the highest price for tobacco use: the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that by 2030, 80 percent of tobacco-related deaths will occur in low- to middle-income countries, the report said.

In Lebanon, over 3,500 people die each year because of tobacco exposure at a cost of around $900 million, according to the Health Ministry.

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• Tomorrow’s regular customers? Stamping out tobacco use in the Middle East and Africa (PDF) 

Tomorrow’s regular customers? Stamping out tobacco use in the Middle East and Africa is a research paper written by the Economist Intelligence Unit and sponsored by Pfizer. . . .

The findings are based on more than 40 interviews with experts from government, academia, NGOs and the tobacco industry in the Middle East, Africa and elsewhere. We would like to thank the Economist Intelligence Unit’s extensive network of country analysts for organising and conducting most of these interviews. . . .

This report focuses on one portion of the developing world—the Middle East and Africa (MEA)— which has become a key battleground in the struggle over government policy and public attitudes.

Although the region can lay claim to adult smoking rates mostly on par or lower than those of many Western and developing nations, expanding populations mean that even if rates were to stay relatively steady, the absolute numbers of smokers would still rise.

The MEA region also poses other deeply entrenched challenges. These include rising youth smoking rates, particularly among girls, a prevailing culture of acceptance around tobacco, especially the water pipe, widespread governmental ambivalence and a strong tobacco industry lobby. But charities and other non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have gained a foothold in recent years. They often work on a shoestring, but are increasingly supported with much-needed financial lifelines from rich Western philanthropists.

“There is a change in mentality in our region. Ministries of health are working with the WHO and other NGOs—bringing together all the people working on tobacco control,” says Dr Jean-Pierre Baptiste, a regional adviser with the WHO’s Tobacco Free Initiative in Algeria. He is one of more than 40 experts from government, academia, NGOs and the tobacco industry interviewed for this report.

But are their efforts enough? In this paper, we investigate the progress that has been made, the challenges that remain, what lessons can be drawn from successful policies elsewhere and how the landscape could look in a decade or two. We examine ten major markets in-depth—four in North Africa: Egypt, Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia; two in Sub-Saharan Africa: Nigeria and South Africa; and four in the Middle East: Lebanon, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The key findings of the report are highlighted below.

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• Smoking Threatens Africa With Cancer Epidemic 

Tobacco use in Africa is growing faster than in other continents, says Dr. John Seffrin, who has been on the frontlines in the war against cancer for several years and now serves as the chief executive officer of the American Cancer Society. Taking part in the recent LIVESTRONG Global Cancer Summit in Dublin, Ireland, he hailed the global unity shown in reducing the stigma of cancer and working harder at prevention, early diagnosis and treatment. He spoke with allAfrica.com.

How did the cancer summit come about?

Lance Armstrong [the American professional road racing cyclist who has survived cancer] and the Lance Armstrong Foundation decided that it was important to have not just another meeting on cancer, but a special summit that would bring together people from all over the world and a diverse group of people that would include scientists, public health professionals, survivors and advocates. The foundation raised money and worked with other organizations like the American Cancer Society to put this summit on. It was a smashing success and we hope it will be a launch pad for people to work better together to solve the cancer problem. . . .

How does Africa fit in when it comes to global tobacco use?

Africa has relatively low tobacco use prevalence rates. But it has the fastest increasing prevalence rates. They're low compared to China, where 60 percent of the men smoke, but they're going up faster than anywhere in the world. We at the American Cancer Society are committed to doing tobacco control in Africa because here's a chance to prevent an epidemic of disease that otherwise will happen.

The tobacco industry is rapaciously promoting its product in all areas of the world where prevalence rates are low. So we're targeting Africa and we need to get on the ground with prevention programs before it's too late. It's a lot easier to prevent people from starting ever to smoke than it is to get them to quit because it's so addictive. Here's an opportunity to get dramatic results and that is to prevent what has become the single largest cause of preventable death in the world: addiction to tobacco.

How might you go about doing that in Africa?

The number one thing that can be done in any part of Africa is to change current public policies. If every country in Africa would implement the protocols of the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control they could get dramatic results.

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• Big Tobacco Sets Its Sights on Africa 

In recent years, the world has increasingly been cleaving into two zones: smoking and nonsmoking. In the U.S. and other developed countries, Big Tobacco is in retreat, chased to the curbs by a combination of lawsuits, smoking bans, rising taxes and advertising restrictions. Fewer than 20% of adult Americans now smoke -- the lowest rate since reliable records have been kept -- and a tobacco crackdown is under way in Europe, Canada and elsewhere. In April, Congress boosted federal cigarette taxes threefold, from 32 cents a pack to $1. In June, President Barack Obama signed a law giving the FDA the power to regulate cigarettes like any other food or drug.

But the West is not the world, and elsewhere smoking is exploding. In China, 350 million adults are hooked on tobacco, which means the country has more smokers than the U.S. has people. Smoking rates in Indonesia have quintupled since 1970. In Russia, boys as young as 10 start lighting up. This year, tobacco companies will produce more than 5 trillion cigarettes -- or 830 for every person on the planet.

It's in Africa, however, that the battle for the hearts, minds and lungs of new smokers is being waged most aggressively -- and Nigeria offers a telling look at how the fight is unfolding. . . .

Big Tobacco's footprint in Africa has been hard to miss for a while. British American markets its wares — which include Dunhill and Pall Mall — in a vast crescent sweeping from South Africa to Congo and west to Ghana, as well as throughout North Africa. In 2003 the company planted its stakes deeper, building a $150 million factory in Nigeria. Philip Morris, whose brands include Marlboro and Chesterfield, has a smaller presence on the continent. "We are a minor, minor player," says spokesman Greg Prager. But that could change. The company does no business in Nigeria, but it controls about 15% of the market across North Africa and has a scattered 10% share elsewhere. It has also built a new factory in Senegal.

That expansion increasingly happens through the single-stick model, and that's the traffic that causes the most worry.

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• Organized crime plundering West Africa: UN 

Fewer drugs have been flowing into Europe from West Africa in recent months but organized crime is plundering the sub-region through illicit trafficking in arms, women, cigarettes and toxic waste, according to a UN report released Tuesday.

"Less drugs are flowing through West Africa. We must ensure that this downward trend continues," said Antonio Maria Costa (photo), executive director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).

Since 2004, Colombian drug traffickers have increasingly made use of West African countries (Ghana, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Guinea Bissau, Togo, …) as a transit area for their cocaine shipments to Europe, according to UNODC.

But while the amount of cocaine passing through West Africa has dropped from a high in 2006 of 40 tons, one-quarter of all cocaine entering Europe, other illicit items such as cigarettes, arms, toxic waste, counterfeit medicines as well as oil and other natural resources like hardwood and diamonds are being trafficked through the region, according to the UNODC Threat Assessment. . . .

As much as 80 percent of the cigarette market in some west and north African countries is illicit, meaning that most of the smoking going on in these countries is profiting criminals.

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Over 5 million people die of tobacco yearly -WHO regional director  

The World Health Organisation (WHO) regional director for Africa, Dr Luis Sambou, has stepped up calls for the usage of picture warnings in effort to expose the deadly effect of tobacco, whose consumption rate continues to pose serious treat to the world’s population.

Dr Sambou’s call is contained in a message delivered as part of activities commemorating World No Tobacco Day, on the 31 May, 2009. Describing tobacco as the leading preventable cause of death in the world, he revealed that more than 5 million people die from its effect every year. This, he added, is more than all deaths resulting from HIV/AIDS, Malaria and tuberculosis combined.

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Baaba Maal’s new album and his causes 

late into the Kensington townhouse headquarters of Palm Pictures, his long-time record label, quibbling with Suzette Newman, Palm’s London chief, over whether Africans or Jamaicans are more unpunctual, is very different. He is wearing a safari suit in minute checks and toying with an iPhone. For the first time in nearly a decade he is releasing a new album, Television. . . .

The title track expresses Maal’s unease about the spread of television throughout Africa. But he also sees benefits, not least for his own campaigns. He made a programme for Senegalese TV, lobbying against smoking. “In small villages, kids who finish work in the fields or fishing don’t have much to do. The traditions have all gone, but nothing modern has come to replace them yet. They’re stuck in the middle, and all they have to do is smoke. I just said, ‘I’m not doing it any more.’ And my fans copy me, and find that it’s very good for them.”

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• Quit Smoking for Africa 

SOS Children is launching a new campaign asking smokers to "quit for Africa".

"Even though everyone understands the health benefits" said ex-smoker and fundraising director Kathie Neal "giving up smoking is a long and painful haul which requires sticking power. Knowing that the money you save is directly helping children alone could really help".

Even if they buy some cigarettes abroad, smoking ten cigarettes a day typically costs a smoker between £60 and £120 a month, the same as the cost of 3 to 6 child sponsorships. SOS Children suggests that to increase the satisfaction of quitting and help smokers to celebrate their ongoing achievement they use just 60p a day, a small part of this saving, to sponsor a child in Zambia, Zimbabwe or Malawi, tobacco-growing areas of Africa. SOS Children helps children throughout Africa

"The actual benefit to the African worker from a tobacco smoker is tiny, since the losers when you quit smoking are mainly the tax man and tobacco companies (who get most of the money from cigarettes" explained SOS CEO Andrew Cates "but nonetheless it seems appropriate to give something back to the countries which will lose the export".

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Development in Africa 

Our companies have operated in Africa for over a century and today we do business in over 40 African countries. We have contracts with over 50,000 farmers in four African countries to source tobacco leaf.

Like other multinational businesses, we contribute to development in Africa through tax payments, employment, investment and training local talent.

We are also responsive to the particular issues facing Africa, so our companies invest in other ways to support communities and development. These include training farmers, providing small business support and skills training, tackling child labour and AIDS, funding scholarships and supporting sustainable agriculture, environmental and wildlife conservation projects.

Commission for Africa

Our Chairman Jan du Plessis takes a keen interest in Africa and led British American Tobacco’s involvement as one of the businesses contributing to the Commission for Africa, established by the British Prime Minister Tony Blair. The Commission addressed sustainable development and new ideas for a strong and prosperous Africa, during the 2005 British presidencies of the G8 and the European Union.

Jan participated in the Commission’s consultation with businesses investing in Africa and initiated one of its most successful business work streams. This addressed the problem of how trade, which could grow prosperity for Africa, is blocked from expanding by major customs issues of bureaucracy, delays, corruption and high and unpredictable costs.

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TV programme: “Bannatyne takes on big tobacco” 

A BBC TV programme on 1 July 2008, called ‘Bannatyne takes on big tobacco’, painted a very negative picture of our business in three countries in Africa, including alleging that we target children to sell cigarettes and break our own strict International Marketing Standards.

Viewers who trust the BBC to be fair, impartial and balanced should know that this was not a BBC news documentary, governed by BBC rules obliging news reporters to be fair, impartial and balanced. By the producers’ own admission, it was “a personal view”, putting across very strong opinions, subjective views and judgements made by one individual, a TV personality called Duncan Bannatyne, who has a campaigning anti-tobacco stance.

We don’t want children to smoke.

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• Smoking in Ghana: A review of tobacco industry activity  

FINDINGS

British American Tobacco, and latterly the International Tobacco Company and its successor the Meridian Tobacco Company, have been manufacturing cigarettes in Ghana since 1954.

After an initial sales boom in the two decades after independence in 1957, the sustained further increases in consumption typical of the tobacco epidemic in most countries did not occur. Possible key reasons include the taking of tobacco companies into state ownership and a lack of foreign exchange to fund tobacco leaf importation in the 1970s, both of which may have inhibited growth at a key stage of development, and the introduction of an advertising ban in 1982. BAT ceased manufacturing cigarettes in Ghana in 2006.

CONCLUSION

The tobacco industry has been active in Ghana for over 50 years but with variable success. The combination of an early advertising ban and periods of unfavourable economic conditions which may have restricted industry growth are likely to have contributed to the sustained low levels of tobacco consumption in Ghana to date. . . .

What this paper adds

This paper provides the first account of tobacco industry activity in Ghana.

It indicates that the current low prevalence and tobacco consumption in the country are likely to be attributable at least in part to:

• Constraints on industry growth arising from foreign exchange shortages and the taking of the industry into majority government/public ownership at a time of rapidly increasing demand in the mid 1970s

• The imposition of a comprehensive advertising ban soon afterwards, in 1982 It also demonstrates that progression of the tobacco epidemic in developing countries is not inevitable, and that early restrictions on industry growth and advertising may be important steps in prevention.

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Health Condemn Tobacco Use 

LOCAL and international health experts want Uganda and other developing countries to curb tobacco smoking and reduce salt intake to stem cancer, diabetes, respiratory and heart diseases.

The ailments classified as lifestyle diseases are fast becoming epidemics and will account for 70% of deaths in a few years the experts warned. They said that the problem is global but the hardest-hit are are the poorest and the middle-income countries of Africa and Asia. . . .

The experts were meeting in an International Summit on Chronic Disease at the Kampala Serena Hotel.

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Anti-tobacco advocates call for ban on smoking 

Tobacco control advocates have called for actions that would put pressure on governments in Africa for effective tobacco control policies and laws to put an end to tobacco usage and smoking.

They argued that tobacco companies had targeted Africa, especially its youth, to make them addicted to their products and make money out of their illicit and perilous business.

The training programme, organized by the Africa Tobacco Control Regional Initiative (ATCRI), is to equip members on policy and advocacy, help them change policy and train them in epidemiology and make a difference in their respective countries.

Participants come from Ghana, Nigeria, Liberia, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Malawi, Ethiopia and The Gambia. . . .

Mr Oscar Bruce, Vice President of Coalition of NGOs on Tobacco Control and Environmental Rights Action/Friends of the Earth complained about the numerous deaths being recorded as a result of tobacco smoking. . . .

Mr Bruce explained that the British American Tobacco (BAT) alone made profits of 5.28 million dollars each year from every 1,000 sticks of cigarettes it sold in Africa.

“In Ghana, this translates to about GH¢0.23 per pack. So if a person in Ghana smokes one pack per day, then, he or she contributes GH¢83.95 in profits per year to BAT.”

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This World, Bannatyne Takes on Big Tobacco 

Duncan Bannatyne, multi-millionaire and the scourge of Dragons' Den journeys to Africa to explore the rise in the number of kids smoking, and the activities of one tobacco company in particular. He uncovers evidence of the extraordinary marketing tactics of one British-based cigarette company which he believes are encouraging kids to smoke. His sharp business brain forensically gathers the evidence and then confronts the company back in London. But this is not just a hard hitting investigation, this is an emotional journey for Bannatyne. An ex -smoker himself, he loves Africa and in his travels he has a laugh with a tobacco grower, he is teased by the dinner ladies at a school in Malawi where he helps to cook the dinner, and he has to deal with the cockroach in his hotel room. He also meets kids as young as 11 who are not only smoking 10 a day, but also trying to make a living selling cigarettes.

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