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Protesters Claim IMF Promotes Smoking
Michael L. Betsch
Staff Writer
But according to an IMF report, some countries are economically dependent on tobacco farming. "For these countries...a decline in global [tobacco] demand could result in job losses" in countries the IMF is trying to help.
Robert Weissman, a co-director for Ralph Nader's activist group Essential Information, says the IMF is pressuring developing nations to sell their inefficient state-run tobacco monopolies to profit-minded multinational tobacco corporations.
Weissman said the IMF encourages economically strapped countries to reduce their tobacco taxes and tariffs, thereby enabling multinational tobacco companies to make cigarettes more affordable while reeling in new smokers.
"This is really about how the IMF is pushing policies that benefit Philip Morris and the other multi-national tobacco companies," Weissman said. "What we're calling on the IMF to do is to reverse these policies - to end its support for tobacco tax cuts or tariff reductions or privatization."
'Big tobacco means big money'
Weissman said the multinational manufacturers have the money to launch aggressive advertising and promotional campaigns in developing nations, whereas state-owned tobacco companies have neither the resources nor the expertise to lure in prospective customers.
Weissman co-authored a report that documents IMF support for the reduction of tobacco taxes or tariffs in five developing countries as well as its support for privatization in five others. The report was released Monday during a protest in front of the IMF building in Washington.
In the report, Weissman claims that trade liberalization and tobacco privatization will lead to more smoking in countries such as Djibouti, Gambia, Macedonia, Peru and Uganda.
Just look at what happened when the Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and Thailand opened up to foreign tobacco imports, he said. "Smoking rates rose by 10 percent as a result of the tobacco tariff reductions enacted in the Asian nations."
In South Korea alone, he said, smoking rates among teenage girls quintupled in a single year following the opening of the market to the multinational tobacco companies.
Essential Action claims millions of young smokers, especially young girls and women, will be lured into smoking if the multinational tobacco firms continue their takeover of state-run tobacco producers in developing countries.
Weissman said Essential Information is calling on the IMF and other international financial institutions to end all support for tobacco privatization, reductions in tobacco excise taxes and reductions in tobacco tariffs and duties.
Alternatives to higher tobacco taxes
The IMF does not subscribe to Essential Information's theory that raising tobacco taxes is the only way to reduce smoking rates across the globe.
According to study featured in the IMF's quarterly magazine Finance Development, "Taxation is a blunt instrument."
The study claims that higher taxes on cigarettes may deter young people from ever purchasing cigarettes, but those taxes would also hurt poor adult smokers who have been smoking for years.
And, contrary to the opinion of Essential Information, worldwide governments are urged to consider non-tax measures as an effective way of reducing the public's demand for cigarettes and increasing public health. Those non-tax measures promoted by both the IMF and the tobacco companies include tobacco advertising bans and anti-smoking ads; warning labels on tobacco products; restrictions on smoking at schools, on the job, and in public places; and increasing access to no-smoking programs.
Philip Morris International spokesman Remi Calvet said his company has a very clear position on ways to reduce smoking rates worldwide: "We think it is very legitimate for the health authority to develop anti-smoking campaigns," he said. "That is their role - we have no issue with that."
"Our position is very clear. Smoking is an extremely risky behavior, it causes disease, it is addictive and we think that tobacco should be sold only to adults who have made an informed decision whether or not to smoke."
Calvet said it is Philip Morris International's position that using tobacco taxes as a method of smoking prevention must be a government decision made at a local level.
"I don't think the world is ready for a unique level of tax," he said. "We have to look at the countries; the money the populations' have; and where we start from. We have many different considerations nowadays."
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