Tobacco Industry, Profiting from a Killer Product
The Times Kuwait Report
Statistics from the World Health Organization (WHO) presents a grim picture of the pernicious grip that tobacco use has on the physical health of people and the fiscal health of nations. According to latest WHO data, nearly eight million annual deaths — one person every four seconds of the year — are attributed to tobacco-related diseases. An additional 1.3 million deaths occur due to second-hand exposure to tobacco smoke.
The WHO figures also reveal that in 2020, around 22 percent of the global population —36.7 percent of men and 7.8 percent of women—used tobacco products. Additionally, an estimated 37 million children aged 13-15 years worldwide use tobacco.The tobacco industry uses insidious strategies to make their harmful product appear innocuous and appealing to sustain young users and trap new ones. In many countries the rate of e-cigarette use by youngsters exceeds that of adults.
Tobacco use, including smoking, chewing tobacco, using snus, vaping, and other new forms of tobacco consumption, is a major risk factor for various chronic diseases, including cancer, lung disease, cardiovascular disease, and stroke. It is expected that over half of current tobacco users will die prematurely from a tobacco-related disease.
Tobacco use also leads to significant economic and social costs. The Union for International Cancer Control estimates that in 2022 the total economic cost of tobacco use was more than US$1.7 trillion, including from health care costs for treating tobacco-related diseases, and from loss of productivity and human capital due to illnesses and deaths. A significant portion of this loss now occurs in developing countries that can ill-afford such costs.
In many developed countries, growing public sentiment against tobacco use, and stringent anti-tobacco policies by governments, has forced the tobacco industry to shift marketing and purveying of their products to developing countries, where rules and regulatory policies are often lax. Today, around 80 percent of the world’s 1.3 billion tobacco users live in low- and middle-income countries (LIMIC), where the burden of tobacco-related illnesses and deaths is the heaviest.
The latest edition of the Tobacco Atlas—a joint anti-tobacco initiative of Vital Strategies, a leading international public health organization, and the Tobacconomics team at the John Hopkins University—shows that although the prevalence of smoking is decreasing globally, the total number of smokers remains high due to population growth, as well as continued tactics by tobacco industry to trap new young users to make up for dead tobacco users.
In Kuwait, despite concerted efforts by the Ministry of Health and civil society organizations engaged in reducing prevalence of smoking, tobacco use continues to be a significant public health challenge. Latest data on smoking prevalence in Kuwait reveal that in 2022 prevalence of smoking among adults aged 15 years and older in the population was 22.7 percent (35.6% among men and 2.1% for women).
The figures also show that tobacco use among 10-14 years old in 2022 was 12.8 percent (17% for boys, and 8.5% for girls). In addition, diseases related to smoking or other forms of tobacco use, claimed the lives of 1,549 people, or 12.8 percent of all deaths reported in Kuwait in 2021. Mortality rate among male smokers was 16.1 percent, while among female smokers it was 4.3 percent.
Tobacco taxes are the most effective tobacco control intervention available to policy-makers; sadly they are the least implemented. A sufficiently large excise tax increase will raise the price of tobacco products thereby making them less affordable. This drives down consumption among users, discourages young people from being initiated into smoking, and encourages smokers to quit. Unfortunately Kuwait has no excise duty on cigarettes.
Kuwait only levies an import duty of 100 percent on the cost, insurance, and freight (CIF) value of imported cigarettes, plus a specific import duty of KD8 per 1000 cigarettes, which has not increased over the last decade. Despite other Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries increasing minimum import duties, and introducing excise duties on tobacco products, as part of the 2016 GCC agreement, Kuwait is yet to do so.
To address the tobacco epidemic, WHO Member States adopted the landmark WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (WHO FCTC) in 2003. Currently 183 countries, representing 90 percent of the global population, are Parties to this treaty. To support provisions in the FCTC aimed at lowering tobacco use, the WHO introduced in 2007 MPOWER, a practical, cost-effective initiative that states can use to reduce tobacco demand. It includes, among others, implementing prevention policies, enforcing bans on tobacco advertising, and raising tobacco taxes.
In recent years, Increased push-back from the public against smoking and pressure from health authorities against tobacco use, has forced the tobacco industry to shift focus to new generation tobacco products, including heated tobacco products (HTPs), nicotine pouches and e-cigarettes that appeal to younger generations. The industry claims that their new products are less harmful and a ‘risk reduction’ alternative to tobacco smoking. Despite such claims, there is no such thing as a safe tobacco product.
Available evidence shows that HTPs, e-cigarettes or pouches are not any less harmful than conventional tobacco products, as they all contain nicotine, a highly addictive substance. Moreover, many new tobacco products contain a variety of additional toxicants that are often at higher levels than in tobacco smoke. With newer tobacco products entering the market, Kuwait can further the fight against tobacco by levying a uniform and specific excise tax, adjusted to GDP growth, and accounting for at least 75 percent of the retail market price of tobacco products.
The tobacco industry uses every tactic in the book to conceal the dangers, and true economic and health costs, of its product. In addition the industry employs its massive heft to dilute or repeal restrictive regulations against tobacco products. For instance, it warns developing countries where the industry cultivates tobacco leaves that attempts to regulate their business would result in significant economic costs and impact the livelihoods of farmers and workers employed in tobacco farming.
However, the truth of this claim is dubious at best. According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) the nearly 4.2 million hectares of arable land worldwide under tobacco cultivation, yields a total of a little over seven million tonnes of tobacco annually. Replacing tobacco with more productive and health-beneficial crops such as peanuts, tomatoes, or pulses would be far more productive. Growing peanuts in the same area as tobacco would yield around 13.6 million tonnes per year, while growing tomatoes would produce 164 million tonnes.
The tobacco industry also markets its products aggressively to lower-income populations and youth. In some places the tobacco industry representatives are known to offer free cigarettes to children aged 13 to 15 to entice them into becoming life-long addicts to nicotine, so as to ensure the industry thrives well into the future. It is not surprising that in 2022, the total revenue of the six largest tobacco companies in the world was over US$362 billion, which incidentally is higher than the Gross National Income (GNI) of many developing countries.
The tobacco industry makes and markets products that have together killed more than 100 million people in the 20th century alone—a figure far higher than the number of people killed in First and Second World Wars combined. In order to ensure the health, well-being and prosperity of current and future generations, people, communities, and nations need to collectively push back against the nefarious tobacco industry, its insidious marketing tactics, and its killer products.
