China isn’t doing enough to curb its smoking habit, in part because of the tobacco industry’s success in sabotaging anti-smoking efforts, an international panel of experts said in a report released Thursday.
“The tobacco industry opposes tobacco control everywhere. But that opposition is very effective in China because it has presence in the body heading tobacco control,” Yang Gonghuan, lead author of the report and deputy director general of the Chinese Center for Disease Control, told Reuters.
China ratified the World Health Organization’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control in 2003, pledging measures to curb tobacco use, including smoke-free legislation, large and clear warnings on the harmful effects of tobacco on cigarette packs, and total bans on all forms of tobacco advertising. But the expert panel predicts in its report, titled “Tobacco Control and China’s Future,” that deaths from cigarette smoking in China will triple in the next two decades, killing some 3.5 million people annually by 2030.
One hindrance to an effective antismoking policy identified in the report is that the same Chinese government agency in charge of maximizing tobacco production is also responsible for controlling tobacco use. Yang noted that when the government imposed higher taxes on the industry to reduce consumption, tobacco firms absorbed the tax without raising the consumer price.
“Raising prices and using pictorial health warnings [on cigarette packs] are [the] two most effective measures but they used all ways and means to stop them,” he said.
China has 300 million smokers and they consume one-third of the world’s cigarettes. Nearly 60 percent of men in China smoke.
