The overwhelming bulk of evidence presented on the second day of World Health Organisation’s hearings into the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control called on the international health body to impose tough restrictions on the sale and marketing of tobacco.  

Speaker after speaker took to the podium to denounce the hazards of tobacco   smoking and the marketing strategies of the big tobacco companies which increasingly targetted children and women in developing countries.  

Among the calls most consistently made to the WHO panel were that any treaty controlling tobacco should ban tobacco advertising and marketing, should significantly raise excise duties to make cigarettes more expensive, and should seek to protect non-smokers from the harmful effects of passive smoking.  

Anti-tobacco advocate, Greg Connolly of the Massachusetts Coalition for Healthy Futures warned that the new, co-operative face presented by the big tobacco companies at the hearings should not be believed. He said that every time his organisation had attempted to find out the contents of cigarettes they had been sued by the tobacco industry.  

“I urge the panel to listen carefully to what the tobacco industry is saying, because they have not changed,” said Connolly.  

He said the tobacco industry had to be made to take responsibility for the consequences of what happened when its product was used as intended. “Today ten thousand people will be killed by cigarettes, this convention must make the deaths of those ten thousand their (the tobacco industry’s) problem,” he said  

The hearings were injected with a fresh energy when the representative of one of the world’s big three tobacco firms, Philip Morris stepped up to give evidence. Vice president of Philip Morris Europe, David Davies said his company supported the development of a “sensible and meaningful” convention for tobacco control.  

“We are proud of our products. We believe in our business,” he said. He added that his company was in step with the public health authorities and acknowledged that smoking was addictive and caused disease in smokers.  

In response to a question from the WHO panel as to which diseases he believed smoking caused he answered calmly, “smoking causes lung cancer, emphysema and cardio-vascular disease”.

In the face of almost unanimous support for tough international controls on tobacco, one of the few other dissident voices was that of the tobacco   growers who argued that tobacco was not a crop that could be easily replaced. However, this view was countered by lobby groups from Kenya, Zimbabwe, Malaysia, Bangladesh and Brazil which argued forcefully that it was the tobacco companies that profited from the sale of tobacco at the expense of individual farmers.

An anti-tobacco activist and journalist from Brazil, Thias Corral said even though her country was the world’s largest exporter of tobacco leaf and tobacco farming sustained some 130 000 small family farms, this agriculture was completely controlled by the industry.

“People must buy seed from the industry and sell their tobacco at prices set by the industry,” she said. “Women and children are exploited and made to work on these family farms to keep them going.”  

The completion of the hearings yesterday (Friday) will be followed by the start of a week of negotiations among WHO members as to what measures should be included in the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control and what individual protocols should be agreed in specific regions and countries. The negotiations begin on Monday. -Health-e News Service.