Smoke and mirrors

Is the message getting through? (Copyright WHO/Saurabh Mittal)

How effective are  the global efforts to reduce the use of tobacco?  Not very, to judge by the fact that the world’s major tobacco companies are still doing good business, finding new markets,new customers and making profits.

You would imagine that companies that make products that in the WHO’s estimates kill 5 million people worldwide every year, and are the leading cause of preventable death, would have been forced by now to wind up their business and disappear from existence.

Nothing could be further from the truth.  If you go to the slick, beautifully designed websites of  the major players in the global tobacco industry you are plunged into the a world in which tobacco and cigarettes are products like any other, competing for market share at a time of continuing global economic uncertainty, and doing reasonably well under the circumstances.

These companies speak the language of corporate social responsibility: “One of our principle goals is to be a socially responsible company. Because of this we are passionate about our social responsibility”, declares Phillip Morris International (PMI), one of the world’s tobacco giants.

British American Tobacco (BAT),  another global giants, says its vision is “to lead the tobacco industry through growth, productivity and responsibility.”

The tobacco companies acknowledge the harm that smoking causes (though in mild language that avoids words like death), and their goal is to ensure in the words of the BAT website “balanced regulation” which presumable will allow them to keep selling and marketing cigarettes as well as other tobacco products.

Philip Morris declares that it supports regulation, but not regulation that “prevents adults from buying and using tobacco products or that imposes unnecessary impediments to the operation of the legitimate tobacco market.”, or regulations that “reflect prohibitionist policies that severely restrict, if not eliminate, the ability of tobacco companies to compete.”

If tobacco control is to be effective, it has to restrict the ability of companies to function. But governments do not have the stomach for that.

In the absence of  strong efforts to curb tobacco use, the companies seem to be doing well. British American Tobacco, in its latest interim management statement for the first quarter of this year, declared that its four “ Global Driver Brands”, Dunhill, Lucky Strike, Pall Mall and Kent, “ delivered good performance and achieved overall volume growth of 6 percent, and share growth in a number of key markets.”   Selling cigarettes in the Asia Pacific region is a key source of revenue and profits, and in 2009, the company made over one billion pounds sterling in profits from the region

At a recent investor conference held in Lausanne, Andre Calantzopoulos, the Chief Operating Officer of PMI , delivered an upbeat assessment of the companies performance, and described new strategies to get young  people ( or “ Young Adult Smokers over the age of 18” as they are described) to develop a taste for that old classic Marlboro with packet and product changes.

There has been a clear failure in international efforts to combat tobacco.  Five years ago, an international treaty, the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control came into force. Countries  declared they would “protect present and future generations from the devastating,  health, environmental and social consequences of tobacco consumption and exposure to tobacco smoke.”  Brave words indeed, but like many other global treaties, words that have not been matched by action from national government.

The results of a WHO study on implementing tobacco control measures make pathetic reading: only 10 percent of the world’s population is covered by even one of the major tobacco control policies. The percentage of world population covered by any of the major tobacco control meaures is shown here: