Issue 7, May 2001

 

A significant step towards proper consumer information

 

For hundreds of years, past generations smoked in complete ignorance of the harm caused to their health. It was only in the middle of the last century that the connection between smoking, ill-health and premature death came to be fully recognised. Nowadays, the risks speak for themselves. Every second EU citizen who smokes regularly will die prematurely as a result, losing, on average, fourteen years of life. Each year smoking kills more than 550,000 people in the EU – more than one million throughout Europe as a whole.

 

Tobacco is the cause of the greatest health epidemic in the world. Given what we now know, no government would ever allow tobacco to be marketed if it were to be ‘discovered’ for the first time today. Yet despite our knowing the real consequences of smoking for the past fifty years, the tobacco industry has escaped virtually any regulation. Tobacco companies have been allowed to sell a product, well aware that it will kill one in two of their regular customers when used exactly as intended, but without any obligation to provide honest and meaningful consumer information.

 

The EU Directive on Tobacco Product Regulation has been introduced as an Internal Market measure. This is right and proper, given that tobacco is a consumer product widely traded throughout the EU; often by multinational companies using the same brand names, imagery and marketing techniques from one country to another. But, as the Treaty requires, the Directive also seeks to ensure a high level of human health protection. In this respect, the Directive can be seen as an important initiative by the EU to promote the interests and well-being of its citizens.

 

The Directive will have the effect of removing trade barriers in the EU, for all manufacturers will have to operate to the same standards and with the same degree of transparency throughout the Community. It respects and upholds the right of consumers to be fully and properly informed about the nature of alternative products on the market. By ensuring accurate and clearly visible warnings about the risks associated with the product, the Directive also has the potential to protect public health.  For all these reasons, we urge Members of the European Parliament to support the text of the Directive agreed recently in conciliation, when it is put to the vote during the forthcoming Strasbourg Plenary Session.

 

Provisions of the Directive

 

The Directive has to be transposed into national law by 30 September 2002. Most provisions have to be implemented within the following two years, although the final date of application of maximum yields to export products is delayed until 01 January 2007. The main features are:

 

• The maximum yields of cigarettes, marketed or manufactured in the Member States, shall be: Tar 10 mg, Nicotine 1 mg, Carbon Monoxide 10 mg.

 

• Health warnings, printed in black on a white background, have to appear on the front of each cigarette pack, to cover 30% of the surface area (32% for two languages and 35% for three languages), and on the back of the pack to cover 40% of the surface area (45% for two languages and 50% for three languages).

 

• The Commission is asked to draw up rules on the use of colour photographs or other illustrations by 31 December 2002. Members States may then decide whether to use colour photos or illustrations, but only in accordance with these rules.

 

• Tobacco products shall be marked with batch numbers or equivalent, to ensure product identification and traceability.

 

• Tobacco manufacturers and importers are required to notify Member States of all the ingredients used in their products by brand name and type. This has to be accompanied by a statement setting out the reasons for their inclusion, especially whether they have any addictive effects.

 

• Misleading descriptors – i.e., texts, trademarks and figurative or other signs suggesting that a particular tobacco product is less harmful than others – shall not be used in the packaging of tobacco products.

 

Mechanisms will be introduced to ensure that the implementation of the Directive is properly monitored and that the provisions of the Directive are kept up-to-date in terms of scientific developments. These ‘mechanisms’ include the establishment of a regulatory committee and a duty on the Commission to provide bi-annual reports to the Council and the Parliament.

 

The tobacco industry and job losses

 

The tobacco industry’s major complaint against the Directive concerns alleged job losses. The industry claims that the so-called ‘ban on exports’ will mean factory closures as production is moved to plants outside the EU. British American Tobacco (BAT), for instance, has ‘warned that it might be forced to shut two factories in the UK, with the loss of 1,800 jobs’. BAT workers have travelled to Brussels and Strasbourg to lobby MEPs to ‘safeguard their livelihoods’. Yet there are inconsistencies in these arguments, and in the overall attitude of the tobacco industry towards job security.

 

First, the Directive contains no ‘ban on exports’. It applies to all tobacco products, whether manufactured or marketed within the EU. This respects the principle of natural justice and recognises that the EU has responsibilities for health which are indivisible. Why adopt one set of standards for EU citizens and another for people living elsewhere?

 

Second, there is no evidence that export markets will refuse to accept tobacco products that comply with the new EU regulations on maximum yields. The allegations of potential job losses are based on a hypothesis that has not been justified. In fact, in terms of consumer self-interest, the argument is much more likely to be wrong than it is to be right.

 

Thirdly, the numbers of alleged job losses are not justified. Any number will do, so long as it is sufficient to frighten MEP’s into voting against the Directive. This is not rational advocacy, but scare tactics; the industry is shamefully using its workforce to exert emotional pressure on policy makers. The workers protest that they are worried about their livelihoods. No mention of the lives of consumers whose health is daily put at risk by their products.

 

Fourthly, the tobacco industry is two-faced in its concern about jobs. When it is in its economic interests to do so, the industry is happy to lose jobs. Ironically, as the Directive was being debated last year, the tobacco trade journals were reporting takeovers, acquisitions and corporate restructuring, involving job losses designed to meet ‘aggressive performance targets’.

 

One story related to Japan Tobacco, which had purchased R J Reynolds International (manufacturers of Camel cigarettes) in 1999 [1]. It was proposing to close its Manchester Tobacco Co Ltd (MTC) plant, because overcapacity in the tobacco market ‘brought into question the need to export from MTC to other European countries and the Middle East [2].’ Another concerned Brown & Williamson – which is owned, ironically by BAT. In common with many western tobacco companies, BAT had bought heavily into eastern Europe’s tobacco industry (previously state monopolies). Through the 1990’s, this process of purchase and investment was followed by ‘rationalisation’, and then job losses. As BAT workers were lobbying MEP’s over alleged job losses in Strasbourg last December, BAT’s subsidiary in Georgia announced plans to ‘eliminate up to 300 jobs through a voluntary separation programme at its plant in Macon’ in order to reduce costs [3]. Did BAT send its workforce to lobby any politician, anywhere, about real job losses in Georgia? Why ask?

 

Why? Why go on about this at length? Because the issue of job losses has proved to be the tobacco industry’s major argument against the Directive. From every angle, however, it proves to be a false argument. It deserves to be rejected, just as much as the Directive as a whole deserves to be supported in the interests of proper regulation of a widely traded product which has such devastating consequences for individual consumers and for public health.

 

We thank you for your interest and look forward to your further support, at this final stage of the co-decision process.