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Philip Morris International joined with U.S. tobacco industry groups on Thursday to ask President Barack Obama's administration to challenge Canada's new law banning flavored cigarettes and small cigars.
Their request comes even as the administration takes its own steps to ban candy, clove and other flavored cigarettes.
"Canada's ban on blended cigarettes violates its WTO (World Trade Organization) obligations and could impose serious economic hardship on U.S. growers of burley tobacco," Roger Quarles, president of the Burley Tobacco Growers Cooperative Association, said in a statement.
"We are asking USTR (U.S. Trade Representative) to review our arguments and to take a strong stand for U.S. burley growers and American jobs," he said.
Philip Morris, which markets its tobacco products in approximately 160 countries, joined the burley growers and several other tobacco associations in asking USTR to press Canada on the issue at a WTO meeting on "technical" trade barriers next week in Geneva.
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Indonesians should turn their attention away from Malaysian theft of their culture to American maltreatment of a rather different national icon – the kretek cigarette.
As of October 1 it will become a criminal offense in the supposedly free United States to sell kretek, the clove-enhanced cigarette dear to most Indonesian smokers and increasingly to foreigners. Indonesia should take this behavior to the World Trade Organisation. The country which in the name of free trade has for decades ensured that its tobacco companies are foisted on the world has the temerity to ban somebody else's exports to the US. . . .
The hypocrisy of the US is stunning. According to a study by Frank J. Chaloupka and Adit Laixuthai for the National Bureau of Economic Research, the US in the 1980s and 1990s used Section 301 of the 1974 Trade Act to force open the cigarette markets of Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and Thailand. "Estimates from fixed-effects models indicate that the market share of US cigarettes in Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, and Thailand increased dramatically after the agreements as consumers switched from the brands produced by domestic monopolies to the brands of US cigarette producers," Chaloupka and Laixuthai wrote. "In addition, simulations based on the regression results indicate that per capita cigarette consumption in 1991 in the four affected countries was nearly 10 percent higher than it would have been had the markets remained closed to U.S. cigarettes." . . .
In fact smoking disease patterns suggest that American-style flue-cured, Virginia tobacco with chemical additives which are the most dangerous cigarettes – certainly compared with the air-cured black tobacco ones such as France's traditional Gauloises and Gitanes.
The ban on kretek is discriminatory. One can be sure that if cloves were grown in the US there would be no such ban. As it is, Indonesians might think a reasonable riposte would be to ban all US-brand name colas until the kretek ban is lifted. After all, who knows what noxious substances are in Coca-Cola? The formula is a secret.
When US Ambassador to Thailand Ralph "Skip" Boyce led a peeved delegation of US companies - including Marlboro and big alcohol producers - to lodge their complaints with the Public Health Ministry about a national ban on cigarette advertisements and a pending one on liquor promotions, US commercial diplomacy toward Southeast Asia hit a new nadir.
If it seems odd that a senior US envoy would so publicly play the role of US corporate spokesman, that's because historically it is. But Boyce, a career diplomat who speaks fluent Thai and often portrays himself as a friend to the country, has perhaps more than any other senior US diplomat in Southeast Asia pushed forcefully President George W Bush's many controversial policies in the region - regardless of the moral consequences. . . .
Southeast Asian policymakers should bear in mind that very soon the US may not be as attractive a destination for their products as in the past. Collapsing housing prices and spiraling consumer and national debt levels promise to dry up America's once insatiable appetite for consumer goods. Rather, regional governments would be wise to expend their trade energies in forging closer ties with less demanding, higher-growth-potential China, India and petrodollar-rich Middle Eastern regimes, and less on deliberating unequal pacts with the US.
That way, when the likes of Ralph Boyce come knocking with US corporate demands, it will be that much easier for Southeast Asian governments to keep the door shut.
The lighter company, made famous during World War II, has filed a complaint with the U.S. International Trade Commission alleging violations of section 337 of the Tariff Act of 1930. Zippo, and ZippMark, the company that owns the Zippo trademark, identified seven companies in its complaint that manufacture and/or sell lighters that look like Zippo lighters in the U.S.
"It is simply an action on our part to kind of focus Customs personnel on the fact that we have a trademark," Zippo Chief Executive Officer Greg Booth said. Manufacturers are "bringing these trademark and shape infringing (lighters) into the country.
Youth anti-tobacco activists from around the world will march to the headquarters of the Motion Picture Association of American (MPAA) in Washington, D.C., on Thursday, July 13, and hold a press conference calling on the MPAA to take action to reduce smoking in the movies, including requiring an "R" rating for any movies with a non-historical depiction of smoking.
At noon Thursday, the youth will march to the MPAA headquarters, located at 1600 I St. NW, from the Washington Convention Center, where they will be attending the World Conference on Tobacco or Health. The march will follow the release of a study by the American Legacy Foundation earlier Thursday about the prevalence of smoking in movies popular with youth. That study will be released during a session of the World Conference from 10:30 a.m. to noon in Ballroom A of the Washington Convention Center.
The youth, from over 30 countries, will also march to the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative to call on the Administration to keep tobacco products out of trade agreements and to the White House to call on the U.S. and other countries to ratify the international tobacco control treaty, the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC). . . .
The march will follow the release of a study by the American Legacy Foundation earlier Thursday about the prevalence of smoking in movies popular with youth. That study will be released during a session of the World Conference from 10:30 a.m. to noon in Ballroom A of the Washington Convention Center.
We are writing to urge that the U.S. exclude tobacco products from a U.S.-Malaysia Free Trade Agreement.
Our basic position is that there is no legitimate purpose for inclusion of tobacco products in trade agreements, which are designed to facilitate trade and remove tariff and non-tariff barriers to commercial transactions -- an inappropriate goal for tobacco products, consumption of which is harmful. This is a consensus view among the leading tobacco control groups in the United States.(1)
In these comments, we first very briefly review tobacco control efforts in Malaysia, and then explain why inclusion of tobacco products in the FTA would threaten such efforts.
I offer this update on the Ways and Means Committee hearing held earlier today.
I questioned Deputy U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwabb on provisions to reduce tobacco tariffs in the Oman-U.S. Free Trade Agreement and on other troublesome chapters. You can view and hear my questioning by clicking on the links below.
This link jumps directly to my questions on tobacco: http://www.house.gov/doggett/speeches/omantobacco040506.wmv
US lawmakers called on the White House to exclude tobacco products from a proposed pan-American free-trade pact because lower tariffs would make it easier for tobacco companies to recruit new smokers in Latin America.
"We urge you to insist that tobacco products, including cigarettes and smokeless tobacco, be excluded from this trade-promoting agreement," the lawmakers wrote in a letter co-signed to US President George W. Bush .
Representatives Henry Waxman of California, Lloyd Doggett of Texas and Senator Richard Durbin of Illinois made their plea as top trade officials from 34 countries prepared to meet in Miami later this week for the final phase of negotiations to establish the Free Trade Area of the Americas.
By the time the first organized demonstration wandered Tuesday into downtown Miami, police were more than ready to deflate it.
A ragtag group of demonstrators intent on protesting the easing of tobacco tariffs at the Free Trade of the Americas conference found themselves under the gaze of a hovering police helicopter. They had brought with them a large inflatable cigarette pack, but authorities quickly took exception to the gasoline-powered generator the protesters wanted to use.
So they were reduced to having a mock "die-in" around their deflated giant pack of Marlboros in front of the Torch of Friendship -- a stone's throw from where ministers from 34 countries are meeting this week to talk about erasing of trade barriers in the hemisphere.
"We're concerned about delivering our message," said Robert Weissman, co-director of the anti-smoking group Essential Action.
Miami has been transformed into an armed camp of police of just about every ilk in an effort to avoid violence that has marred other trade summits elsewhere.
This week, trade negotiators from the United States and 33 other nations will meet in Miami to negotiate the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). We strongly urge the U.S. and other countries to recognize the uniquely harmful nature of tobacco products and exclude such products from any trade agreement. U.S. policy should be to do everything we can to reduce tobacco use and its tremendous toll in health, lives and money around the world, and not to help the tobacco companies export and sell more of their deadly products overseas.
The FTAA negotiations are occurring amid evidence that the Bush Administration may be abandoning an executive order issued by President Clinton that stated, "In the implementation of international trade policy, executive departments and agencies shall not promote the sale or export of tobacco or tobacco products, or seek the reduction or removal of foreign government restrictions on the marketing and advertising of such products."
South Korea backed down from plans to impose an immediate 40 percent tax on imported cigarettes, opting to introduce the tariff in 10 percent increments over four years, starting in July, to avoid potential trade conflicts.
The tax will rise by 10 percent a year until it reaches 40 percent in July 2004, the Ministry of Finance and Economy said in a statement. This will allow foreign companies two-to-three years to set up factories for local cigarette production and ease the burden on Korean consumers, according to the ministry.
``We will also avoid potential trade conflicts, following complaints from overseas cigarette makers,'' said Jung Jae Ho, a ministry official.
The government's plan to levy 40 percent customs duties on imported cigarettes has met with opposition from the US government, which has formally requested that duties be lowered.
The US protest is first time a government has formally opposed duties on cigarettes. Private cigarette exporters in Japan and Britain have in the past requested that customs duties be lowered.
The government plans to meet vwith US trade representatives, who are due to arrive in Korea this week, to discuss the issue.
A high-ranking official at the Ministry of Finance and Economy said Sunday that the USTR had sent a letter to the ministry, asking that customs duties be lowered on the grounds that sales of US made cigarettes will be hurt if such a high rate of duty is levied.