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UNICEF calls for global tobacco curbs

Thursday, 1 May 1997: Negotiations on the future of the tobacco industry in the United States should be a first step towards worldwide restrictions on the promotion and sale of tobacco products, especially to children and adolescents in the developing world, UNICEF Executive Director Carol Bellamy said today.

"With the industry increasingly under siege in industrialized countries, " Ms. Bellamy said, "there is no more promising market for new smokers than the predominantly young populations of the world's developing regions. The tobacco companies know that their best customers are those they snare early in life."

Cigarette sales in developing countries have risen substantially in recent years, she said, and there are already signs of the devastation to come. It is estimated that of today's children and teenagers, 300 million will be killed by tobacco in adulthood if current trends continue. A third of such deaths currently occur in developing countries, with the figure projected to rise to two-thirds early in the next century.

"The calculated expansion of the tobacco market to these regions is a direct challenge to UNICEF's day-to-day efforts to save impoverished children from diseases that are largely preventable," she said. "There is no cause of death more preventable than smoking."

The World Health Organization has projected that 10 million people a year will die worldwide from tobacco-related illness by the year 2025, more than triple the current toll -- and that 7 million of these deaths will be adults in the developing world, most of whom began smoking at a young age.

Ms. Bellamy called for an urgent effort by the international community, including the World Trade Organization, to develop a global strategy to treat tobacco products commensurate with the harm they cause, beginning with prohibitions on all direct and indirect tobacco advertising and promotional activities aimed at children and young people.

Other measures, the Executive Director said, should include a ban on sales of tobacco products to minors; substantial tax increases on tobacco products; and a stepped-up educational campaign to promote awareness of the addictiveness of nicotine and the dangers of smoking.

Such steps, she said, would be in accord with the provisions of the 1989 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.

With smoking generally on the decline among more affluent, health-conscious adults in industrialized countries, major tobacco companies are pinning their hopes for profits and growth among the young and the poor, especially in the vast, unregulated markets of Asia, Latin America and the countries of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.

Sales of tobacco overseas by the companies based in the United States, the world's largest tobacco exporter, have more than tripled in the quarter-century since overall smoking rates in the US began to decline.

Like their counterparts in the industrialized world decades ago, young women in developing countries have become especially inviting targets for tobacco promoters in the 1990s, Ms. Bellamy said. This marketing strategy has grave implications not only for them but their children.

Although bodily damage to children and young people who become addicted to nicotine is usually not apparent until middle age, there is mounting evidence that tobacco use also harms the very youngest, she noted.

Mothers who smoke risk a higher rate of miscarriages, and studies have linked smoking during pregnancy to low birth weight in infants, a factor strongly associated with infant mortality and illness. Smoking by parents and others in enclosed environments in the home has also been linked to an increased incidence of asthma and acute respiratory infections in children.

Beyond the loss of life, the economic consequences of smoking are extensive, various international surveys suggest, not only in added strains on already overburdened health-care systems, but in losses stemming from such factors as absenteeism from work, reduced productivity, fire losses, and lost income because of early death.

In developing countries already struggling with crushing health-care problems, the additional burden of tobacco-related illness is unsupportable.

"The unregulated growth of the tobacco market in these regions," Ms. Bellamy said, "not only threatens millions of additional lives a year, but undermines the whole fabric of economic and social development."

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