50 Facts That Should Change the World by Jessica Williams

Author:Jessica Williams
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Current Affairs
Publisher: Icon Books
Published: 2010-12-01T05:00:00+00:00

Eighty-two per cent of the world’s smokers live in developing countries

It is hard to overstate the public health disaster wreaked by tobacco. Every year, nearly 5 million people die as a result of smoking.1 It is the number one preventable cause of death in the world. Five hundred million people alive today will die prematurely from tobacco-related diseases. As Gro Harlem Brundtland, Director-General Emeritus of the World Health Organisation (WHO) put it, ‘It is rare – if not impossible – to find examples in history that match tobacco’s programmed trail of death and destruction. I use the word programmed carefully. A cigarette is the only consumer product which when used as directed, kills its consumer.’2

Over the coming years, more and more of those deaths will come in the developing world. There are more than 1.1 billion smokers worldwide, and 82 per cent of them live in low- or middle-income countries.3

In the industrialised West, the number of smokers has been steadily declining. In 1955, 56 per cent of American men smoked; by 2001, this was down to 25.2 per cent.4 British figures show a similar decline: from 51 per cent in 1974 to 28 per cent in 2001.5 Fifty per cent of men in low- and middle-income countries are smokers. In China alone, more than 300 million men smoke, leading one tobacco industry giant to conclude: ‘Thinking about Chinese smoking statistics is like trying to think about the limits of space.’6

The increasing liberalisation of global trade has fuelled the developing world’s taste for tobacco. The US threatened a number of Asian countries with trade sanctions if they did not open up their markets to American tobacco manufacturers. Japan, South Korea, Thailand and Taiwan eventually dropped import restrictions, and the market share of Big Tobacco in the region soared. In order to keep up with their new rivals’ sophisticated promotion strategies, national tobacco companies intensified their own marketing efforts. Before the Taiwan market was opened up, 26 per cent of boys and 15 per cent of girls in Taipei had tried smoking. By 1990, four years after the US companies gained access, the figures were 48 per cent for boys and 20 per cent for girls.7 Business was booming.

The WHO reports that tobacco advertising in Cambodia rose by 400 per cent in just four years during the 1990s. In Malaysia, tobacco companies account for 20–25 per cent of all advertising, despite the fact that they are not allowed to advertise cigarettes directly. Companies have responded by marketing a range of spurious products ‘such as the Benson and Hedges bistro, Dunhill accessories, Marlboro clothing, Kent Horizon tours, Peter Stuyvesant Travel and Salem Cool Planet concerts’.8

Women and young people in developing countries offer a particularly tempting prize to tobacco companies. Compared with their counterparts in the industrialised world (where about 22 per cent of women smoke), women in lower-income countries smoke far less – just 9 per cent are regular smokers.9 The tactics employed to appeal to women in the US in the 1920s

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