WHO SEEKS GLOBAL TREATY AGAINST SMOKING

The World Health Organisation is working on the world's first multilateral treaty focusing specifically on a public health issue - smoking. The treaty may call on governments to impose taxes on tobacco, provide guidelines against tobacco advertising and also lay down ground rules against the lucrative trade in cigarette smuggling.

By Thalif Deen

March 1999

United Nations: The World Health Organisation (WHO) is formulating a new global convention against smoking - an addiction which accounts for some 3.5 million deaths annually.

WHO Director-General Gro Harlem Brundtland said on 4 March that the Geneva-based UN agency currently is working on the world's first multilateral treaty focusing specifically on a public health issue.

A former Prime Minister of Norway, Brundtland has placed high priority on tobacco as a major health issue, and is set to battle one of the world's strongest political lobbies.

The convention against smoking comes in the wake of several new UN treaties - dealing with terrorism, climate change, landmines, desertification, and children's rights - adopted by the General Assembly. When the anti-smoking convention is finalised, it will go before the World Health Assembly, the WHO's governing body, for approval.

'The Assembly called for such a convention two years ago,' Brundtland said, adding that the treaty may call on governments to impose taxes on tobacco, provide guidelines against tobacco advertising and also lay down ground rules against the lucrative trade in cigarette smuggling. Additionally, the proposed convention will also ensure that individual countries are protected from the impact of multinational tobacco companies.

In 1997, total sales of the US tobacco industry alone amounted to more than $48 billion, compared with only $1.4 billion by gun manufacturers, who have had the backing of a powerful political lobby.

The US tobacco industry, however, has been fighting a losing battle against scores of lawsuits brought by individuals whose family members have died of lung cancer. The industry has been sued by dozens of city and state governments across America, who wanted reimbursements for millions of dollars spent on medical costs for cancer patients in state-run hospitals.

Brundtland said there are many countries which now have national laws against tobacco consumption. But there are no major restrictions on the sale of tobacco products to developing nations.

'So we need to discuss this across the board, and it is much easier for countries to have a policy when they have a pattern of solidarity across borders,' she said. If all governments agree on uniform high taxes on tobacco, she said, it would not be possible for one country to undercut the other.

Asked if the Marlboro Man, the riveting symbol of the US cigarette industry, has moved to the Third World, Brundtland said: 'Absolutely, and nobody stops him being there in most cases.'

She praised the US administration for formulating rules and regulations against the tobacco industry 'which are better than in many other places'.

The WHO has argued that transnationals are shifting their focus to Third World nations, which would account for 70% of all tobacco-related deaths worldwide. In China, smoking is already blamed for 75,000 deaths annually - and this is expected to rise to three million by the time today's young smokers reach middle age.

The WHO's anti-smoking initiative has strong support from the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF), which calls for global curbs on tobacco.

'With the tobacco industry increasingly under siege in industrialised countries, there is no more promising market for new smokers than the predominantly young populations of the world's developing regions,' UNICEF Executive Director Carol Bellamy said. 'The tobacco companies know that their best customers are those they snare early in life.'

Bellamy said that according to current estimates 300 million children and teenagers would be killed through smoking, if current trends continued.

'The calculated expansion of the tobacco market to these regions is a direct challenge to UNICEF's day-to-day efforts to save impoverished children from diseases that are largely preventable. There is no cause of death more preventable than smoking,' she said.

UNICEF calls for prohibitions on all direct and indirect tobacco advertising and promotional activities aimed at children and also urges a ban on sales of tobacco products to minors and substantial tax increases on tobacco products.

Derek Yach, head of the WHO's Tobacco-Free Initiative, told a delegation of the International Tobacco Growers Association on 3 March that the WHO is not against tobacco farmers. 'But as the world's premier health agency, WHO is committed to addressing the tobacco epidemic,' he added.

Yach said that tobacco is a killer and tobacco growers must separate their concern for their own livelihood from the public health impact of tobacco which could kill up to 10 million annually by the late 2020s.

'WHO cannot simply stand by and count the dead,' said Richard Peto, a scientific adviser to the UN agency. - Third World Network Features/IPS

About the writer: Thalif Deen is a correspondent for Inter Press Service, with whose permission the above article is reprinted.

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