Argentina drags feet on tobacco control

As the third-largest population among the 20-odd countries still resisting ratification of the World Health Organization’s 2003 Convention on Tobacco Control (after the United States — notoriously allergic to joining international conventions of any kind — and Indonesia), Argentina is very much in the sights of the global anti-smoking campaign — it thus might or might not be a coincidence that this city was chosen for the sessions of the WHO study group on regulating tobacco products from Monday until yesterday.

Around a quarter of all Argentine adults or some 6.5 million people smoke, reported Dr Douglas Bettcher, Director of the Global Programme for Tobacco Free Initiative, and half of them will eventually die of tobacco-related disease — at the rate of 40,000 a year plus 6,000 victims of passive smoking (the worldwide figures are five million deaths and 600,000 respectively). Underpopulated Argentina needs its people, Bettcher pleaded.

So why the hesitation in joining the mainstream of 169 countries ratifying the convention? Mainly the lobbying of northwestern tobacco provinces (which include Tucumán — curiously the first of four Argentine provinces to enforce smoke-free public spaces thanks to current national Health Minister Juan Luis Manzur) in defence of jobs. But Brazil has a much larger tobacco industry, pointed out Brazil’s Vera Costa e Silva, and has ratified the convention without any jobs being lost — the smoking universe of around a billion people globally does not shrink amid rising world population. Jobs are being transformed by a fast-changing economy anyway. What job losses there have been result from mechanization by a greedy tobacco industry, adds Bettcher, who points out that the earnings of tobacco-growers in Indonesia are less than half other farmers.

Just how far would the anti-smoking campaign like to go in restricting tobacco products, the Herald asked at yesterday’s press conference, pointing out that prohibition of alcohol had given birth to Al Capone while Mexico today is being torn apart by drug cartels. Prohibition is neither feasible nor practical and is not sought, Bettcher replied — it would create the biggest crime syndicate ever with fearsome money-laundering and terrorist links. The study group’s aim would be the strict regulations of convention perhaps carried a few steps further — for example, Australia’s recent plain packaging legislation.

The strategy is to kill the tobacco business by taking away the demand, not banning the product.

The WHO campaign against tobacco continues to be based on the health hazards, as it has been for decades, but there are a few new twists — for example, emphasis on the toxic waste caused by cigarette butts and the attraction of sharply increasing cigarette taxation in these times of exploding fiscal deficits, one of the few areas where taxation is not only safe from being counterproductive but is downright useful in public health terms (Japan, Australia, France and the US have all gone down this road).


In general, the WHO experts feel that Argentina could do much better and would like to see the anti-smoking legislation now in force in Santa Fe (also Neuquén, San Luis and Tucumán) nationwide.