UN report finds freer trade boosted smoking
By Robert Evans
GENEVA, Aug 21 (Reuters) - A United Nations-sponsored report has found that freer global trade over the past two decades has boosted smoking, especially in developing countries, by making the dangerous habit cheaper.
But the report, issued by the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the World Bank, suggested that the fault lies more with governments than the open-trading rules of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) or its predecessor, the GATT.
And it indicated that if the rules were fairly applied to domestic and foreign producers, countries wanting to reduce cigarette consumption could do so without serious risk of a challenge through the WTO's dispute settlement system.
Analysis of information from 42 countries, the report said, "clearly demonstrates that trade liberalisation has led to increases in cigarette smoking, with the most significant impact in low-income and middle-income countries."
But its authors, international economists and medical researchers, said the outcome of the only tobacco-related case so far to come to the GATT or WTO suggested measures taken to protect health did not need to conflict with global trade rules.
And they said governments that argued that protecting their people's health justified trade restrictions had generally done little to limit consumption of domestically produced cigarettes.
The report, "The Impact of Trade Liberalisation on Tobacco Consumption," had until now gone largely unnoticed as a small section of a nearly 500-page study issued earlier this month on "Tobacco Control in Developing Countries".
The study is part of a mounting campaign by the WHO, supported by the World Bank, to convince governments to work together to reduce smoking.
The WHO says some 100 million people died during the 20th century as a result of smoking cigarettes and predicts that if current rates continue one billion will die from smoking and smoking-related illnesses in the 21st century.
According to the study, tobacco is becoming one of the single biggest causes of death in the world and by 2030 is expected to kill some 10 million people a year, over two thirds of them in developing countries.
The smoking surge in Asia, Africa and Latin America, the trade report found, was largely a result of ending national monopolies on tobacco manufacture and sale as a result of growing trade liberalisation since the 1980s.
Agreements in the GATT, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, which was absorbed into the WTO in 1995, opened long-closed markets to foreign--mainly Western--imports.
The ensuing competition forced down prices, bringing cigarettes within the reach of poor people for the first time and enabling the better off to indulge the habit more, according to the report.
The United States lodged a complaint against Thailand in 1990 over a ban on cigarette imports and won when a panel ruled against the ban, saying it could have been justified if all sales of tobacco products, domestic and imported, had been prohibited.
The message from that decision, the report said, was that strong tobacco-control policies to reduce the damage to health of smoking "are consistent with international trade agreements as long as they are applied in a non-discriminatory fashion".:
