Tobacco.org

• ARGENTINA: Tobacco Treaty Unratified, Six Years On 

Six years after signing the global World Health Organisation Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, Argentina is the only Latin American country that has not ratified it, for fear of losing tens of thousands of rural jobs in seven provinces.

The WHO convention, the first global public health treaty, was signed in 2003 by then President Néstor Kirchner (2003-2007). But parliamentary ratification is still pending. . . .

But these provisions, accepted by other tobacco-producing nations, are staunchly opposed in Argentina by the tobacco industry and farmers, and ratification has been blocked in Congress by the representatives of tobacco-producing provinces.

"Until there is a replacement activity for tobacco growers, of which there are around 26,000 small producers around the country, ratification of the convention is unlikely," Senator Sonia Escudero from the northwestern province of Salta, one of Argentina’s main tobacco-growing areas, told IPS.

"Our provinces are among the poorest in the country, and if we lose the 60,000 jobs that tobacco production provides, it would be complete chaos," she said.

But civil society organisations pressing for ratification of the treaty downplay those arguments.

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• World No-Tobacco Day in LAC: Argentina Targets Homes and Cars 

How did Argentina celebrate World No-Tobacco Day? Besides events emphasizing kids (including the release of balloons in the national colors in a busy downtown Buenos Aires intersection - see picture), Health Minister Ginés González García announced the official launch of a new component to the National Tobacco Control Strategy entitled "Homes and Automobiles Free of Tobacco Smoke."

The new campaign will not only employ print, radio and television ads [such as the TV ad "cunita" ("the cradle") provided below — click the image to view in a pop-up window — which tells about the good and productive life the baby will have — if the parents stop smoking around him in the home.] to try to persuade adults to stop smoking in their homes and vehicles for the sake of their kids' health (and that of non-smoking relatives and friends).

It will also employ educational programs targeted at kids in school and young adults in university about the health dangers of secondhand smoke

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• Tobacco advertising banned in Buenos Aires City 

Public advertising of tobacco in Buenos Aires City has been banned as from the first day of 2007, under municipal law 1799 passed in late 2005, amid a drive to curb smoking-related illnesses in Argentina that according the national government kill 40,000 people a year.

The city last October banned smoking in cafés and restaurants smaller than 100 square metres after banning smoking in state premises in 2005. Other cities like Tucumán, Santa Fe and Córdoba have enforced similar legislation.

Buenos Aires City ban means a severe blow for public advertising as tobacco firms reportedly rank among the top 10 advertisers.

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• Argentine farmers won't kick tobacco habit  

The South American country has joined the list of nations cracking down on smoking and its tobacco farmers have long been encouraged to replace at least some of their tobacco crops with alternatives ranging from pigs to pine trees.

But in the verdant province of Misiones, tobacco is still the most profitable crop for small farmers, and growing tobacco lets them join a union that gives them health insurance and the power to negotiate better prices with tobacco companies.

"Tobacco isn't as bad as people think because it gives us a livelihood," said Da Rosa, sitting on the veranda of his cottage surrounded by rain-splashed orange trees, bright green tea bushes and young tobacco plants.

"There are a lot of heavy anti-smoking campaigns but cigarette sales are still the same and in the grand scheme of things, they won't stop people smoking," he said.

The nearby town of San Pedro lies some 800 miles north of Buenos Aires at the heart of the tobacco-producing region of Misiones, named after the missions established by Jesuits in the area in the 17th century.

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• Ban confines smoky bars to Buenos Aires history 

The smoky bars and cafes of Argentina's capital, where tango lyrics celebrate the "sensual pleasure" of a cigarette, may never be the same now that a tough smoking ban has taken effect.

In a country where about a third of people smoke, the new ban prohibits lighting up in public spaces smaller than 100 square meters (1,100 sq feet), with cafe owners facing fines of up to 2,000 pesos ($640) if they allow customers to flout the law.

Under the new rules, which follow similar bans in other Argentine cities, bigger establishments will have to provide a separate, contained area for smoking customers.

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• WORLD IN BRIEF: THE AMERICAs 

· BUENOS AIRES -- The smoky bars and cafes of Argentina's capital, where tango lyrics celebrate the "sensual pleasure" of a cigarette, may never be the same now that a tough ban has taken effect prohibiting smoking in public spaces smaller than 1,100 square feet.

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• Paraguayan Smuggling Crossroads Scrutinized 

CIUDAD DEL ESTE, Paraguay -- For years, this region -- where the boundaries of Paraguay, Brazil and Argentina converge -- has been considered a teeming stew of globalization's more unseemly byproducts. Much of the trade that crosses the borders, officials say, is illegitimate. The region is full of smuggled goods and laundered money.

Now U.S. officials are launching a broad series of new measures aimed at uncovering money-laundering rings that they believe are funding Hezbollah and other radical groups. . . .

Meanwhile, the State Department this year helped draft stricter anti-money-laundering legislation that was passed by Argentina's congress. The U.S. Embassy's legal adviser in Asuncion, Paraguay has held training courses during the past year for investigators and prosecutors in charge of combating possible terror links, according to the Justice Department.

Glaser said it is the links to Hezbollah and other radical groups that "concern us most."

U.S. officials cite a smuggling case in March in which 19 people were charged in Detroit for allegedly operating an international ring that illegally moved cigarettes through Paraguay and Brazil. The indictment alleged that profits were funneled to Hezbollah. . . .

A trip to one of two warehouses where agents collect three to four tons of confiscated goods from the markets each week offers an instant corrective to that notion. The cardboard boxes are bursting open with pirated CDs and DVDs, PlayStation games, shoes, Hello Kitty dolls and watches. The air smells like tobacco, from thousands of cartons of phony Marlboros.

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• Uruguay smoking ban toughest in Latin America 

Uruguay imposed a ban on smoking in public spaces on Wednesday, the stiffest restrictions on smoking in Latin America.

President Tabare Vazquez, a practicing oncologist, was the impetus behind the government-decreed measure, which is among the world's toughest and is similar to bans already in place in Ireland, Sweden, Norway and Spain.

The ban prohibits smoking in all enclosed public places, from bars and restaurants to office buildings and shopping malls. The government says smoking causes 5,500 tobacco-related deaths a year. About 1 million of Uruguay's 3.2 million people smokes.

Workers spilled out on the streets during their lunch hour on Wednesday, many puffing away on local Nevada brand cigarettes and lamenting the new regulations in this tiny South American nation. . . .

Cuba imposed a smoking ban in most public places last year, but the measure has not been seriously enforced on the island famed for its fine cigars.

In Buenos Aires, across the River Plate from Uruguay, the first phase of an anti-smoking law also took effect on Wednesday, barring people from smoking in municipal government buildings.

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• Tobacco industry successfully prevented tobacco control legislation in Argentina 

Conclusions: The tobacco industry, working through its local subsidiaries, has subverted meaningful tobacco control legislation in Argentina using the same strategies as in the USA and other countries. As a result, tobacco control in Argentina remains governed by a national law that is weak and restricted in its scope. . . .

What this paper adds

Tobacco control in Argentina is governed by a weak 1986 national law that essentially codified the tobacco industry’s ineffective voluntary advertising code and a weak health warning on cigarette packages. No measures to regulate secondhand smoke have ever been taken at the federal level and indoor smoking is widely prevalent in the country.

Transnational tobacco companies have been highly influential in Argentina. Using similar strategies as elsewhere in the world, the tobacco industry successfully blocked, delayed, and diluted meaningful federal tobacco control bills. Public health officials and tobacco control advocates need to understand how the industry operates and work to isolate the industry and make it more difficult for policymakers to support the tobacco industry.

In Argentina, as throughout the world,170,183,255 the industry has also promoted its "accommodation" programme

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• Tobacco Industry Dominating National Tobacco Policy Making in Argentina, 1996-2005 

The transnational tobacco companies working through their local affiliates dominate production and marketing of cigarettes in Argentina. Philip Morris International and British American Tobacco, as well as other transnational tobacco companies such as Liggett, Reemtsma, Lorillard, and RJ Reynolds International- through their local subsidiaries Massalín-Particulares and Nobleza-Piccardo- have been actively influencing public health policy-making in Argentina since the early 1970s. These transnational tobacco companies have used the same strategies in Argentina as in the United States to block meaningful tobacco control. . . . .

Recommendations

1. The journalists from print and electronic media, public health advocates, politicians and institutional leaders need to become more aware of how the transnational tobacco industry has manipulated and influenced policy making in Argentina, which affects the health of the public, and report this information to the public.

2. The national government, through the Ministry of Health and Environment, should implement a comprehensive educational campaign to enhance awareness about the health dangers of secondhand smoke and to promote the enactment of city-wide, provincial and national ordinances that prohibit indoor exposure to secondhand smoke.

3. Argentina should implement the principal provisions of the Framework Convention

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• EDITORIAL: Smoke gets in your eyes 

Precisely when and how the City Assembly enacts its various laws and bylaws has never been an exact science but the consensus reached over new anti-smoking legislation shows every sign of acquiring the force of law this week. This legislation will not only ban smoking in all public spaces but in the more public of private spaces as well, such as bars, cafés, shopping centres, etc. — in the offices of private-sector firms, however, it seems that smoking will remain up to company policy. But there are still some grey areas. What happens to smoking on television, for example — will the likes of Jorge Lanata be able to puff freely away? And what happens to the advertising of the tobacco industry, such a hot issue in the developed world?

This legislation should certainly be applauded in spirit. . . .

A serious anti-smoking policy could well lead the government into certain contradictions such as the huge benefits accruing to the exciseman from cigarette sales or the active promotion of tobacco-growing as part of a regional policy to help the poverty-stricken northwest. But let us not run ahead of ourselves — this legislation has yet to be enforced by an assembly where the vice of smoking is far from unknown and even if finally passed, who knows if the new anti-smoking rules will not end up with all the force of compulsory seat belts?

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• Argentina makes move to snuff out its smoking habit 

Last month, President Nestor Kirchner proposed sweeping legislation to Congress that would attack smoking on several fronts.

Parts of the law are facing hurdles:

•Legislators from some farming regions are keen to protect Argentina's status as the world's fifth-largest producer of tobacco.

•Media companies that depend on advertising will fight other aspects of the law.

•And some members of Congress, who occasionally have to be scolded into taking their cigarettes out into the hallways during debates, are leery of imposing rules strict enough to be unpopular with a large bloc of voters.

But many average Argentines seem resigned to a fresh wind of change.

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• Double standard 

In the wealthy, developed world where the big tobacco corporations are based, marketing tobacco to youth is often barred or severely restricted. But some of the same tobacco companies that have stopped marketing to youth back home apply a different standard in Venezuela, in much of Latin America and the rest of the developing world.

"(For tobacco companies), we are third-class citizens," said Deputy Rafael Ros, a member of the Venezuelan National Assembly's health commission.

In its advertising, Venezuelan cigarette maker Bigott, a subsidiary of London-based British American Tobacco (BAT), employs only young models engaged in typically youthful activities. Alluring models in bathing suits celebrate on the beach after winning prizes by buying cigarettes, enjoy smoking together at parties or playfully light up under a jacket during a sudden tropical downpour.

Venezuelan law does mandate health warnings on cigarette packs and on advertisements, prohibits tobacco advertising on radio and television, and outlaws tobacco sales to those under 18. But widespread cigarette smuggling minimizes the value of health warnings and the restrictions in sale.

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• LOS DOCUMENTOS DE LAS TABACALERAS QUE MUESTRAN COMO PRESIONARON EN ARGENTINA [Tobacco Documents Show Lobbying In Argentina ] 

A report just published in the U.S.A. on the basis of tobacco documents shows how they contracted doctors in Latin America to resist information on the damage of tobacco.

Each of the documents of this story is public access: all the documents are published in the sites of the two tobacco growers who created Latin The Project, a secret program impelled in ' 91 to oppose Latin America laws, regulations, publicities and one current of opinion that denounced the injurious effects of tobacco on passive smokers. Philip Morris and British American Tobacco designed a detailed plan to revert the consensus against tobacco in the region. They contracted academic, prestigious leaders of opinion and scientists, among them to Carlos Benjamín Alvarez, the present dean of the Faculty of Medical Sciences of the UCA, owner of the Clinic Sacre Coeur, cardiologist Eduardo Menem and Diego Maradona and personal friend of the ex- president. Its management in favor of the North American tobacco growers was essential. For the industry, Alvarez was "the most remarkable case of the lobby exerted by the consultants of the industry on the local governments". Among other favors, the cardiologist had obtained of Carlos Menem a veto for the law Neri that he prohibited, among other aspects, tobacco advertising. This information was presented/displayed in the United States by Joaquin Barnoya and Stanton Glantz, two recognized scientists of the University of California. . .

The published article this week in Tobacco Control, a specialized magazine, documents the campaign developed by the tobacco growers to prevent that in Latin America they are multiplied the type of prohibitions that suffered in the United States. That campaign was called Latin The Project and was in use from 1991 to, at least 1998 authors say. The program was financed 40 percent by Philips Morris International and 60 by the British Tobacco. At the top of the project it was left John Rupp, the lawyer of Covington & Burling that, with time, would be the intermediary personage between doctor Alvarez and the tobacco growers.

The strategy was planned with absolute impunity: in Internet supposedly confidential letters can be seen, the doubts of Rupp, the questions of Alvarez to obtain money, invoicings, budgets, honoraria or recommendations on the profile of the preferred lobbyists of the industry: "the candidates - one of the sections says would have to be preferredly ex- ministers, deans of medicine faculties or members of the national Medicine academies".

The tobacco growers supposed that the propagation in Latin America of the prohibicionista tendency would be imminent and the deeply risky effects for its yield.

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• Argentine Farmers Hurt by Tussle Over Nicotine-Free Tobacco Plants 

One day last April, the local representative of Philip Morris Cos. came to Carmen Soraire's small farm near this agricultural town and, she recalls, took some of her new tobacco seedlings. Soon after, the trouble started.

Ms. Soraire, who for years had grown tobacco for Philip Morris, took up an offer from a tobacco-leaf dealer to plant a crop for somebody else. . .

The plants had been genetically modified by Vector to block almost entirely the formation of nicotine . .

Together with British American Tobacco PLC and other companies, [Philip Morris] called on Argentine authorities to halt cultivation of the genetically modified tobacco on the grounds that it could mistakenly be mixed with the regular tobacco that they buy. . .

the Argentine government ordered the plants seized and burned . . .

When Ms. Soraire refused to surrender her transgenic tobacco to the government, she says Philip Morris's Argentine unit, Massalin Particulares, "slammed the door on me. They said they wouldn't buy tobacco from me anymore." . .

If nothing else, the brouhaha indicates that the tobacco business, always highly competitive, is reaching new heights of intercompany rivalry. . .

Vector, which produces mainly generic brands through its Liggett Group unit, has had trouble getting its modified plants grown, both at home and abroad. And Ms. Soraire and farmers like her here, in the poor, tobacco-growing heartland of Argentina's Tucuman province, are caught in the middle.

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