poledriver
Bluelighter
- Joined
- Jul 21, 2005
- Messages
- 11,543
The west is winning the smoking war, but in our region, the fight has just begun.
IT WAS tipped to send tobacco companies' profits tumbling. The recent plain cigarette packaging High Court victory was hailed by Attorney-General Nicola Roxon as an anti-smoking coup with global implications.
But the latest blow against cigarettes needs some perspective: health experts warn that while the industry begins to lose its grip in developed nations, a humanitarian disaster looms in poorer countries, particularly in the Asia-Pacific region.
The region is now the world's biggest tobacco market, with 6 million new smokers recruited in 2009 and another 30 million expected to be added by 2014, according to industry estimates. The World Health Organisation calculates that of the 6 million people who will die from tobacco use this year, 80 per cent will be in the developing world.
Professor Mike Daube, a World Health Organisation tobacco control adviser and president of the Australian Council on Smoking and Health, has accused cigarette companies of perpetrating a ''tobacco holocaust'' by aggressively targeting poor nations.
'This is an industry absolutely without a moral radar,'' he told The Sunday Age. '
Last week, The Lancet reported ''alarming patterns'' of tobacco use in developing countries. Overall, consumption is growing in these nations by more than 3 per cent every year.
At a time when Australia's adult smoking rate - one of the lowest in the world at 16.6 per cent - continues to drop by about 1 per cent a year, in parts of Asia as many as two thirds of men smoke, and women and children are increasingly taking up the habit.
In China, schools are sponsored by the state-run tobacco industry, while in India mouth cancer rates in children are soaring as a chewing tobacco epidemic takes hold. The biggest commercial player, Philip Morris, has seen its net revenue soar in the Asia-Pacific region from $5.6 billion in 2007 to nearly $11 billion last year, and it has set up production in Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines.
In a statement to The Sunday Age, a Switzerland-based media adviser for Philip Morris International outlined the market's potential: ''A home to over half of the world's population, the Asian region is very important for any global consumer goods company. Tobacco has been used in Asia for centuries.''
Continued at -
http://www.theage.com.au/national/crisis-looms-as-industry-lights-up-asia-20120825-24tls.html
IT WAS tipped to send tobacco companies' profits tumbling. The recent plain cigarette packaging High Court victory was hailed by Attorney-General Nicola Roxon as an anti-smoking coup with global implications.
But the latest blow against cigarettes needs some perspective: health experts warn that while the industry begins to lose its grip in developed nations, a humanitarian disaster looms in poorer countries, particularly in the Asia-Pacific region.
The region is now the world's biggest tobacco market, with 6 million new smokers recruited in 2009 and another 30 million expected to be added by 2014, according to industry estimates. The World Health Organisation calculates that of the 6 million people who will die from tobacco use this year, 80 per cent will be in the developing world.
Professor Mike Daube, a World Health Organisation tobacco control adviser and president of the Australian Council on Smoking and Health, has accused cigarette companies of perpetrating a ''tobacco holocaust'' by aggressively targeting poor nations.
'This is an industry absolutely without a moral radar,'' he told The Sunday Age. '
Last week, The Lancet reported ''alarming patterns'' of tobacco use in developing countries. Overall, consumption is growing in these nations by more than 3 per cent every year.
At a time when Australia's adult smoking rate - one of the lowest in the world at 16.6 per cent - continues to drop by about 1 per cent a year, in parts of Asia as many as two thirds of men smoke, and women and children are increasingly taking up the habit.
In China, schools are sponsored by the state-run tobacco industry, while in India mouth cancer rates in children are soaring as a chewing tobacco epidemic takes hold. The biggest commercial player, Philip Morris, has seen its net revenue soar in the Asia-Pacific region from $5.6 billion in 2007 to nearly $11 billion last year, and it has set up production in Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines.
In a statement to The Sunday Age, a Switzerland-based media adviser for Philip Morris International outlined the market's potential: ''A home to over half of the world's population, the Asian region is very important for any global consumer goods company. Tobacco has been used in Asia for centuries.''
Continued at -
http://www.theage.com.au/national/crisis-looms-as-industry-lights-up-asia-20120825-24tls.html
