Tobacco Companies’ Use of Developing Countries’ Economic Reliance on Tobacco to Lobby Against Global Tobacco Control: The Case of Malawi

Abstract

Transnational tobacco manufacturing and tobacco leaf companies engage in numerous efforts to oppose global tobacco control. One of their strategies is to stress the economic importance of tobacco to the developing countries that grow it. We analyze tobacco industry documents and ethnographic data to show how tobacco companies used this argument in the case of Malawi, producing and disseminating reports promoting claims of losses of jobs and foreign earnings that would result from the impending passage of the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC). In addition, they influenced the government of Malawi to introduce resolutions or make amendments to tobacco-related resolutions in meetings of United Nations organizations, succeeding in temporarily displacing health as the focus in tobacco control policymaking. However, these efforts did not substantially weaken the FCTC.

As instituições e a implementação do controle do tabaco no Brasil

“…However, this point should not diminish the importance of sectoral divergence, as it remains a serious challenge. This divergence between sectors, particularly the health and economic sectors, remains one of the most pressing challenges in many tobacco-producing countries 9,12,28 .…”

Sistema integrado de produção do tabaco: saúde, trabalho e condições de vida de trabalhadores rurais no Sul do Brasil

“…Nesta pesquisa, identificou-se que a indústria "semeou" a ideia de um cultivo rentável e seguro em oposição à busca por culturas alternativas por parte dos agricultores da região, utilizando-se da presença dos instrutores, junto aos trabalhadores rurais, e da propaganda e influência econômica e política, junto ao Poder Público 29 . De acordo com Otanãez et al 30 , em países como o Malauí, onde a indústria do tabaco exerce forte influência econômica e política sobre o governo, as tentativas em minar políticas de controle do tabaco são constantes, configurando obstáculos no desenvolvimento e na implementação de estratégias eficazes.…”

From Discarded Leaf to Global Scourge – The Extraordinary History of the Ascent of Tobacco and its Many Modes of Consumption

“…In China, one government enterprise, the China National Tobacco Corporation, has control over tobacco crop cultivation and tobacco product manufacture and sale, a situation that echoes the state monopolies of the Europe in the past. In Africa, Malawi is the new Virginia, dependent on tobacco for 70% of its export revenue [54] . Here, as in the Americas long before, subsistence agriculture has been displaced by a cash crop, tobacco.…”