Smoking takes its toll in the Third World

Press, 12 February 1979, Page 16

Smoking takes its toll in the Third World

By

ERIC ECKHOLM, a researcher with the Worldwatch Institute,

Washington, D.Ci

A newspaper article by two doctors warning of the dangers of cigarette smoking may not sound like a momentous event. But heads turned when such an article recently appeared in Peking, for hundreds of millions of Chinese were being told for the first time that cigarettes can kill them. The doctors announced the initiation of an unprecedented smoking education programme aimed particularly at youth — a remarkable turnabout in a country where the chainsmoking of the late Chairman Mao has been widely emulated. Whether the winds of change will blow the smoky haze out of Peking’s conference halls remains open to question. As is the case in many countries, the Government itself is deeply mired in the tobacco business: China grows the world’s largest tobacco crop and runs the world’s biggest cigarette company, and the proceeds from cigarette sales are an easy source of investment capital.

Still, China’s about-face on smoking helps draw attention to a neglected aspect of the tobacco/health problem. Even as the world’s more developed countries struggle to cut smoking’s toll in their own societies many poorer countries have given the tobacco interests virtually free rein to hawk their products. Pushed by corporations and governments alike, cigarette smoking is on the rise on the Third World. Tobacco in one form or another has long been used in many poor countries, China included. But now the Western practice qf inhaling one cigarette after the other — the deadliest.• form of tobacco use — is spreading, just at the time when the proportion of smokers in

many developing Western nations has begun to fall. A recent survey in eight Latin Amercian cities revealed that 45 per cent of the men smoked — a higher proportion than now prevails among United States men, 39 per cent of whom smoked in 1975. Eighteen per cent of women in these Latin American cities were smokers, compared to 29 per cent of United States women.

Ironically, the educational and economic elites of the world’s poorer countries are leading their fellow citizens in taking up the practice. In the United States, half the college graduates who ever smoked have stopped. Yet data from India, Malaysia, Nigeria, Uganda, and other developing countries show that Western-style cigarette smoking is especially popular among university students there. Throughout the Third World, it seems, the cigarette bespeaks privilege and knowledge. Perhaps the chief constraint on cigarette use in poor countries is money: only the rich can afford more than an occasional smoke. As incomes in Africa, Asia, and Latin America rise, both the number of cigarette smokers an i their smoking frequency climb as well; oil-rich Middle Eastern countries are providing cigarette merchants with their hottest new market. In Nigeria, lung cancer is still rare, but a medical professor at Lagos University warns that “lung cancer will emerge with the affluence generated by our country’s oil economy; there will definitely be more money for cigarettes.”

Facing market stagnation at home, the Western tobacco companies know where the potential sales bonanza lies. “In the d eve loping countries,

prospects for market growth are attracting strong promotional efforts” by the cigarette companies, observes Dr Daniel Horn, a leading authority on global smoking trends. And, in the Third World, cigarette marketers — whether the affiliates of multinational firms or the increasingly common State monopolies — generally face none of the irksome advertising restrictions and healthwarning requirements that many governments in Europe and North America have imposed on domestic sales.

Tracing the precise roles of Western cigarette companies in the Third World is difficult because they operate through such a complex network of partnerships and licensing relationships. The largest American firm, Philip Morris International, makes or sells more than 175 brands in more than 160 countries and territories. Philip Morris International’s non-United States cigarette sales have grown by a spectacular 18 per cent annually over the last decade.

Governments join shamelessly in the search for tobacco-related profits and foreign exchange. The European Community subsidises tobacco exports, while the United States Government includes tobacco in the Public Law 480 “Food for Peace” programme of concessional agricultural sales to needy countries. This ‘‘humanitarian aid” programme has been used to get rid of unwanted domestic tobacco surpluses, to _ introduce foreigners to United States tobacco in hope of nurturing a future commercial market, and to provide econcnnic aid to politically favoured

governments. The amount of tobacco shipped under this programme has ranged in value from $l7 million to $66 million a year over the last decade.

Third World governments are also mired in the tobacco trade. India, Turkey, and Brazil follow China as prominent world producers, while dozens more developing countries are

now striving to increase their tobacco output. Smoking’s health toll in the Third World has not yet been measured. As the nutritional and sanitary conditions of growing numbers of people improve, however, the ailments that smoking abets — especially heart disease and cancer — are on the rise. In poor as in rich countries.

government action to prevent today’s youngsters from getting hooked on cigarettes will pay off handsomely in the decades to come. As the Chinese doctors put it: "Young people are the successors of our proletarian revolutionary cause, so the Party and the State must show special care for their healthy gorwth.”