Johannesburg - Efforts by governments to reduce the health impact of tobacco could go badly wrong and make the huge illegal tobacco trade even worse if regulation is pushed by pressure groups to extreme measures, British American Tobacco's chief executive Paul Adams said in a statement on Monday.
Adams made the comment in response to a global World Health Organisation meeting in SA at the weekend.
The meeting adopted various guidelines to be positioned as best practice for governments in tobacco policy-making.
According to Adams, the guidelines suggested that the government should ban almost all communication by tobacco companies as well as minimise government contact with tobacco companies.
The guidelines also suggested that any display of tobacco products in shops be banned and furthermore, that the government should force all tobacco product packaging to be plain or unbranded.
The guidelines, said Adams, were intended to give governments a guide to implementing their obligations under the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control 1, a WHO treaty setting out a framework for tobacco regulation.
"But they have been heavily influenced by a coalition of anti-tobacco activists and pressure groups who have special access to the official proceedings of the treaty, while the tobacco industry and many other relevant stakeholders have been effectively excluded except for limited contact with some governments at national level," Adams said.
He said that aspects of the guidelines conflicted with widely accepted legal principles and existing legal obligations of governments and could drive the tobacco trade yet further into the hands of smugglers, counterfeiters and criminals.
"We fully agree that the manufacture, distribution and sale of tobacco products should be regulated, but these `guidelines' raise serious questions about real best practice in policy making.
"They are a potential recipe to vilify and marginalise legitimate, tax-paying, regulated businesses employing thousands of people, and risk forcing tobacco products `underground' where the illicit, non-taxpaying, unregulated trade is already flourishing," Adams said.
Governments, however, did not have to follow "extreme
proposals".
"They can turn their backs on extremism - as many already do - and consult properly with the well run and responsible part of the tobacco industry to shape sound regulation that can reduce the impact of smoking on public health while also sparing their countries from the chaos of tobacco markets run by traffickers.
Adams said that the legitimate tobacco industry could help to block illegal sales to children, fight illicit trade, set standards for appropriate marketing, invest in researching potentially less harmful products and also support thousands of jobs and pay valuable taxes, especially in tough economic times.
British American Tobacco is the world's second largest stockmarket-listed tobacco group by global market share.
- Sapa