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UNICEF backs European plan to ban tobacco ads

Friday, 7 November 1997: A directive banning all direct and indirect tobacco advertising in the 15 nations of the European Union (EU) would constitute a major advance in the protection of child rights to health and development, UNICEF Executive Director Carol Bellamy said today.

A draft directive prepared by the European Commission is currently under consideration by the Council of European Health Ministers, which has scheduled a vote for 4 December in Brussels. The advertising ban would go into effect if approved by both the Council and the European Parliament.

"While it is not UNICEF's intention to intrude on legislative deliberations involving Member States of the European Union, it must be said that we view broad restrictions on advertising as a significant step in protecting children from the ravages of tobacco," Ms. Bellamy said. "Not only would such a ban help save countless lives in the region -- it could lend momentum to the broader campaign for worldwide restrictions on the promotion and sale of tobacco products, particularly to children in developing countries."

UNICEF believes that a global strategy is needed to treat tobacco products commensurate with the enormous harm they cause, she said -- a strategy that must begin with prohibitions on direct and indirect tobacco advertising aimed at children and young people.

The World Health Organization says that unless current trends are reversed, tobacco-related causes will kill more people worldwide by the year 2020 than any single disease.

Under current projections, 300 million of today's children and teenagers will eventually die of tobacco-related causes, 200 million of them in industrialized countries in Europe, North America and elsewhere. But with the tobacco industry increasingly under siege in those regions, the proportion of all tobacco deaths -- currently 3 million a year worldwide -- is expected to shift over the next 30 years to the developing world, where 7 million of the anticipated 10 million tobacco-related deaths will occur.

That is why it is vital, Ms. Bellamy said, that restrictions on tobacco in industrialized countries be matched in the developing world. "The tobacco industry is already seeking to offset its market losses in the North by promoting its products all the more aggressively in the South, especially to children and young women," she said.

Tobacco companies rely heavily not only on direct advertising and promotional give-aways -- much of which seeks to associate tobacco use with sex appeal, adventure, and glamour -- but with more indirect techniques, such as underwriting positive references to smoking in popular movies and other mass media.

"We should have no illusions about the seductive power of modern marketing techniques as a factor in why children and adolescents take up smoking," Ms. Bellamy said. "This is an area where governments have an especially important role to play -- as well as by stepping up the taxation of tobacco products."

She warned that unless steps are taken now, the consequences of vastly increased tobacco use in the developing countries will push already strained health care systems in those regions to the breaking point -- especially in light of projections that within a decade, the vast majority of new AIDS cases will be in developing countries and countries in transition to a market economy.

"The confluence of these two plagues would have truly catastrophic effects on global development efforts," she said.

A group of eminent physicians and cancer research organizations from eight EU counties have strongly endorsed the EU proposal, declaring in an open letter last month that a European advertising ban "would save hundreds of thousands of lives and protect adolescents against a deadly manipulation" -- as well as help limit the damage of second-hand smoke, particularly to infants and to foetuses in utero.

The group, including three Nobel laureates in medicine, noted that tobacco manufacturers spend the yearly equivalent of $2.3 billion on direct and indirect tobacco promotion in the European Union, an effort they said has one clear goal: to "induce the largest number of youngsters to start smoking."

Although the tobacco industry insists that its advertising is aimed at persuading adult smokers to switch brands, not to entice young people to take up smoking, studies indicate that smoking rates do in fact drop when advertising is prohibited. In one report, the United Kingdom Department of Health found that in four countries that have effectively banned tobacco advertising -- France, Finland, New Zealand and Norway -- cigarette sales and smoking prevalence among people aged 15 and older dropped between 14 per cent and 37 per cent.

UNICEF advocacy of worldwide curbs on tobacco products is based on the 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which obligates governments to safeguard the health of infants and children; protect children from drugs and exploitation; and promote health education. The convention, ratified so far by 191 countries, is the most universally accepted human rights instrument in history.

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