Having an interest in the tobacco industry should qualify people to participate in the WHO’s tobacco control deliberations, not disqualify them. Instead, unaccountable and wilfully uninformed technocrats hold the livelihoods of farmers and retailers in their hands.
The World Health Organisation’s flagship non-communicable disease treaty, the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC), is preparing for its 9th Conference of the Parties (COP) in November 2021. To be held in the über-wealthy city of Geneva, Switzerland, it is the very model of an undemocratic, one-sided, technocratic imposition by global elites upon the world’s people.
By design, its deliberations are hidden from the public and, as I wrote recently, exclude everyone with a possible stake in the rules that it makes. These rules, member countries are required by treaty to implement in national legislation.
The WHO’s approach to tobacco violates John Stuart Mill’s harm principle, in that it does not aim merely to restrict behaviour that causes involuntary harm to someone else. It restricts behaviour that only harms people who freely choose to consume tobacco products.
This sets a very bad precedent for technocratic, supra-national law-making.
Convention proliferation
There are already calls for a similar framework convention on obesity control, on the grounds that the tobacco and obesity epidemics are not so different. Others want a framework convention on alcohol control. Still others want a framework convention on food systems, which would address the hypothetical ‘syndemic’ of obesity, undernutrition and climate change.
Expect more framework conventions to follow, to impose laws on us ‘for our own good’, without the pesky need for stakeholder engagement, public participation, or domestic parliamentary scrutiny.
Before long, our every move will be controlled in this manner by the public health experts at the WHO, making rules affecting billions of people, in back rooms far from the oversight of their own national institutions or electorates.
As we have seen with the pandemic response, these public health experts may understand medical matters, but they are entirely ignorant of how economies operate, what motivates people, how cost-benefit analyses work, or how food appears on the table.
If you give them dictatorial power, you end up with tyrannical lockdowns that senior WHO officials themselves called a ‘terrible, ghastly global catastrophe’.
Stakeholders
What the anti-tobacco technocrats pointedly and deliberately ignore is that their machinations, while perhaps well-intended, cause very real harm to people.
They don’t want to have to balance the needs and interests of various stakeholders. All they want is the power to crack down, even though the history of prohibition or the drugs war should have taught them that prohibitions merely serve to drive legitimate business underground.
As Gregory F. Jacob, an attorney who had a hand in drafting the original FCTC treaty wrote in a recent law paper: ‘The FCTC’s stated objective is to progressively reduce tobacco consumption “by providing a framework for tobacco control measures to be implemented by the Parties at the national, regional, and international levels”. That goal has significant economic implications that impact groups ranging from tobacco farmers to wholesalers to importers – yet blanket bans on public and media access have wholly excluded impacted groups from having any voice in, or even the ability to monitor, ongoing deliberations.’
In a future column, I’ll address the consequences for, and harm caused to, the users of tobacco. Today, let’s consider tobacco farmers and tobacco retailers.
Protests
When the Indian government, in pursuit of its commitments to the FCTC, required large pictorial warnings on packets of cigarettes, farmers and small retailers protested against what they called a ‘harsh policy’ that was ‘being implemented in an undemocratic manner, abruptly, without balancing the interests of millions of farmers, factory workers, rural workers and micro retailers’.
‘We do not want to be forced to deliver these messages as they are against the interests of millions of fellow members and struggling communities’, said Karnataka State Beedi Cigarette Trade Association president B N Murali, according to local media.
His organisation said 45,7 million people were dependent on the tobacco industry in India, and no organisation or individual representing their interest was consulted when the rules were framed.
On the other side of the world, in Boston, Massachusetts, over 1 000 convenience stores closed their doors in protest in 2019 against a proposed prohibition on flavoured tobacco products, including menthol cigarettes.
A convenience store industry trade publication quoted Richard Marianos, retired assistant director of the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in Washington, DC, saying the proposal will move products from regulated convenience stores and expand illicit tobacco sales.
‘The revenue generated in Massachusetts from menthol cigarettes is over $2 billion’, Marianos reportedly said. ‘If policymakers move forward with these regulations, there is a wide network of gangs and organized crime that will be ready to fill the void.’
Across Europe, tobacco retailers were up in arms in 2012 about new measures to restrict cigarette packaging and display.
‘These demagogic and completely useless measures will cut tax revenues and turn out of house and home hundreds of thousands of people working in the retail sector, thus fuelling organised crime without bringing any positive effect for public health’, Giovanni Risso, the chairman of the European Confederation of Tobacco Retailers, told the media.
Protests against draconian anti-tobacco laws are nothing new, of course. These snippets were published in the New York Times in 1923 and 1941, respectively:
[INSERT Tobacco Protests 1923 & 1941.png]
A protest by the Federation of All India Farmers Associations against a previous FCTC COP meeting in 2016 sparked a wave of support on Twitter, with more than 10 000 tweets carrying the hashtag #BoycottCOP7, according to the Times of India.
The farmers were demanding greater transparency and participation in decisions they said would affect the livelihoods of millions of tobacco farmers and farmworkers.
These were the people who, when they turned up at the conference venue in Delhi, were promptly removed by security and bused far away, where delegates could not be exposed to the ‘malevolent presence’ of people with ‘an economic interest in tobacco farming’.
Dope alternatives
Malawi’s president, Lazarus Chakwera, earlier this year warned that the country’s leading foreign exchange earner, tobacco, was under threat, and that farmers should be encouraged to switch to cannabis – even though the recreational use of cannabis is not legal in that country.
The president reportedly said that the agriculture ministry would ‘search for a basket of alternative crops so that by 2030, Malawi can do away with its reliance on tobacco.’
Similar moves are reportedly underway in Zimbabwe, another major tobacco producer, and other Southern African countries.
The FCTC worthies are required to consider alternatives to tobacco farming. However, they are required to do so in ignorance, since farming associations are not permitted to address their conferences, on the grounds that they have an economic interest in tobacco farming.
Perhaps they think tobacco farmers in the developing world who find their businesses under pressure will wait for public health experts with zero knowledge of agriculture to tell them what they could grow instead.
Switching to other crops isn’t a trivial matter. Most markets for alternative crops are already well developed and well supplied. Being a new competitor in a crowded market is much harder than being an established competitor in a market you know well. Switching crops also requires resources and capital investment.
Some substitute crops that can be as profitable as tobacco, including sweet potatoes and zucchini, require large investments in infrastructure. The switch to food crops is also made more difficult by protectionism in rich-world countries at the expense of poor farmers in developing countries.
Of course, as the Malawian example shows, there are always drugs. It so happens that marijuana, opium poppies and coca plants all thrive in conditions similar to tobacco, and return generous profits.
Black markets
Autocratic rules that aim to limit the freedom of adults to make their own choices have consequences. Legislating against tobacco as a source of income for farmers actively harms the interests of farmers and retailers in the poor world.
Contrary to the popular image of ‘Big Tobacco’ as consisting only of greedy, heartless multinationals, the industry supports millions of entrepreneurs and employees on farms, in corner shops, and in the informal market. For them, the taxes and restrictions targeting tobacco can mean the difference between their families eating or going hungry.
If you demonise the tobacco industry to save your own populations from their own choices, you undermine farmers trying to earn an honest living. That, in turn, forces them into producing alternative products where they can earn a living.
The grandees in Geneva might think that there is an abundance of space in the agriculture market for these farmers to produce other cash crops, but that is rarely the case. They will find that there are indeed alternatives to legal tobacco farming and trade, and the most profitable is switching to illegal crops, or supplying illicit tobacco to the black market.
Public health interventions, when they are justified at all, should take into account all the evidence, from all the stakeholders who are affected by those decisions. Having an interest in the industry should qualify people to participate in the WHO’s FCTC deliberations, not disqualify them.
Destroying the livelihoods of farmers, retailers and millions of workers in poor countries is cruel at any time, but especially so in the wake of a pandemic, when all countries need robust growth to recover.
The moralistic anti-tobacco crusaders are misguided saviours.